Kate said, "Blink and ten hours are gone. That's no disaster -- but where is it heading? State-of-emergency decrees, nationalizing all the computing power in Tokyo for weather control?"

"Tokyo?"

"Some models show Greenhouse Typhoons reaching the Japanese islands in the next thirty years."

"Fuck Tokyo. We're in Dallas."

"Not any more." She pointed to the status display; exchange-rate fluctuations, and the hunt for the cheapest QIPS, had flung them back across the Pacific. "Not that it matters. There are plans for the Gulf of Mexico, too."

Peer put his heart on the floor and shrugged, then groped around in his chest cavity in search of other organs. He finally settled on a handful of lung. Torn free, the pink tissue continued to expand and contract in time with his breathing; functionally, it was still inside his rib cage. "Start looking for security, and you end up controlled by the demands of the old world. Are you Solipsist Nation, or not?"

Kate eyed his bloodless wound, and said quietly, "Solipsist Nation doesn't mean dying of stupidity. You take your body apart, and you think it proves you're invulnerable? You plant a few forced-perspective memories, and you think you've already lived forever? I don't want some cheap illusion of immortality. I want the real thing."

Peer frowned, and started paying attention to her latest choice of body. It was still recognizably "Kate" -- albeit the most severe variation on the theme he'd seen. Short-haired, sharp-boned, with piercing gray eyes; leaner than ever, plainly dressed in loose-fitting white. She looked ascetic, functional, determined.

She said -- mock-casually, as if changing the subject -- "Interesting news: there's a man -- a visitor -- approaching the richest Copies, selling prime real estate for second versions at a ludicrous rate."

"How much?"

"Two million ecus."

"What -- per month?"

"No. Forever."

Peer snorted. "It's a con."

"And outside, he's been contracting programmers, designers, architects. Commissioning -- and paying for -- work that will need at least a few dozen processor clusters to run on."

"Good move. That might actually persuade a few of the doddering old farts that he can deliver what he's promising. Not many, though. Who's going to pay without getting the hardware on-line and running performance tests? How's he going to fake that? He can show them simulations of glossy machines, but if the things aren't real, they won't crunch. End of scam."

"Sanderson has paid. Repetto has paid. The last word I had was he'd talked to Riemann."

"I don't believe any of this. They all have their own hardware -- why would they bother?"

"They all have a high profile. People know that they have their own hardware. If things get ugly, it can be confiscated. Whereas this man, Paul Durham, is nobody. He's a broker for someone else, obviously -- but whoever it is, they're acting like they have access to more computing power than Fujitsu, at about a thousandth of the cost. And none of it is on the open market. Nobody officially knows it exists."

"Or unofficially. Because it doesn't. Two million ecus!"

"Sanderson has paid. Repetto has paid."

"According to your sources."

"Durham's getting money from somewhere. I spoke to Malcolm Carter myself. Durham's commissioned a city from him, thousands of square kilometers -- and none of it passive. Architectural detail everywhere down to visual acuity, or better. Pseudo-autonomous crowds -- hundreds of thousands of people. Zoos and wildlife parks with the latest behavioral algorithms. A waterfall the size of nothing on Earth."

Peer pulled out a coil of intestine and playfully wrapped it around his neck. "You could have a city like that, all to yourself, if you really wanted it -- if you were willing to live with the slowdown. Why are you so interested in this con man Durham? Even if he's genuine, you can't afford his price. Face it: you're stuck here in the slums with me -- and it doesn't matter." Peer indulged in a brief flashback to the last time they'd made love. He merged it with the current scene, so he saw both Kates, and the new lean gray-eyed one seemed to look on as he lay on the floor gasping beneath his tangible memory of her earlier body -- although in truth she saw him still sitting in the chair, smiling faintly.

All memory is theft, Daniel Lebesgue had written. Peer felt a sudden pang of post-coital guilt. But what was he guilty of? Perfect recollection, nothing more.

Kate said, "I can't afford Durham's price -- but I can afford Carter's."

Peer was caught off guard for a second, but then he grinned at her admiringly. "You're serious, aren't you?"

She nodded soberly. "Yes. I've been thinking about it for some time, but after being flatlined for ten hours --"

"Are you sure Carter is serious? How do you know he really has something to sell?"

She hesitated. "I hired him myself, when I was outside. I used to spend a lot of time in VR, as a visitor, and he made some of my favorite places: the winter beach; that cottage I took you to. And others. He was one of the people I talked it over with, before I made up my mind to come in for good." Peer regarded her uneasily -- she rarely talked about the past, which suited him fine -- and mercifully, she returned to the point. "With slowdown, filters, masks, it's hard to judge anyone . . . but I don't think he's changed that much. I still trust him."

Peer nodded slowly, absentmindedly sliding his intestine back and forth across his shoulders. "But how much does Durham trust him? How thoroughly will he check the city for stowaways?"

"Carter's sure he can hide me. He has software that can break up my model and bury it deep in the city's algorithms -- as a few billion trivial redundancies and inefficiencies."

"Inefficiencies can get optimized out. If Durham -- "

Kate cut him off impatiently. "Carter's not stupid. He knows how optimizers work -- and he knows how to keep them from touching his stuff."

"Okay. But . . . once you're in there, what sort of communications will you have?"

"Not much. Only limited powers to eavesdrop on what the legitimate inhabitants choose to access -- and if the whole point of this place is secrecy, that may not be much. I get the impression from Carter that they're planning to drag in everything they need, then pull up the drawbridge."

Peer let that sink in, but chose not to ask the obvious question, or to show that he'd even thought of it. "So what do you get to take with you?"

"All the software and all the environments I've been using here -- which doesn't amount to all that much data, compared to me. And once I'm in, I'll have read-only access to all of the city's public facilities: all the information, all the entertainment, all the shared environments. I'll be able to walk down the main street -- invisible and intangible -- staring at the trillionaires. But my presence won't affect anything -- except to slow it all down by a negligible amount -- so even the most rigorous verification should pass the total package as contamination-free."

"What rate will you run at?"

Kate snorted. "I should refuse to answer that. You're the champion of one computation per year."

"I'm just curious."

"It depends how many QIPS are allocated to the city." She hesitated. "Carter has no real evidence for this -- but he thinks there's a good chance that Durham's employers have got their hands on some kind of new high-powered hardware --"

Peer groaned. "Please, this whole deal is already suspect enough -- don't start invoking the mythical breakthrough. What makes people think that anyone could keep that a secret? Or that anyone would even want to?"

"They might not want to, in the long run. But the best way to exploit the technology might be to sell the first of the new generation of processors to the richest Copies -- before they hit the open market and the QIPS rate crashes."