“Go on in.” Pal nodded toward the mansion. “If Mr. Zillionaire gives you any trouble, holler. We’ll bust in, right, old buddy?”

Instead of responding, Albert turned, as if following something barely visible against the blue sky. He pointed with his bandaged thumb, like some kind of metaphysical hitchhiker.

“Dust,” he said in tones of bemused interest. “They left shapes in it. Deep ones. Everybody did.”

We all waited a few seconds, but there was no more.

“O-o-okay,” Pal commented. “I hope that’s good news. About dust. Hm.”

Absent and unruffled, Albert put a hand to steady Pal’s chair on the gravel path. Clara and I watched till they rounded a corner, toward the sound of cooing doves. On the roof, several stories above, a reflective dome was said to house the famed hermit himself — realAeneas Kaolin.

With a glance at each other for encouragement, Clara and I headed up broad granite steps.

After rolling along for a while, Pal gives the signal. At last!

I drop from the undercarriage of his chair onto sun-warmed pebbles. Wait for the wheels to pass and … now!

Skittering on-belly, dodging Albert’s human feet, I dash into shade beneath a gardenia hedge. Oof, what stench! Too much of my small head was modeled on a critter who hunts by scent. Should have left more room for brains.

Ah well. Just do what my maker wants. And satisfy the built-in craving of curiosity — better than food or sex. Go!

But keep alert for sensors, trip-threads. My clever eyes tune to see IR beams. Also cockatrices, tripfalls, and regular old gopher traps.

A decorative brickwork niche runs all the way up. Get inside. Deploy claws tipped with diamond augments. Strong paws sink those shiny diamond-tipped claws into stone.

Lovely what you can do with clay, these days.

A platinum rox stood in the foyer, watching servants direct the grunting forklift toward a large study — the same place where Yosil Maharal’s open coffin lay a couple of weeks ago. But Kaolin wouldn’t expect me to know about that. Those memories were destroyed. Supposedly.

The shipping crate was his immediate concern, though he beckoned us to follow. Clara happily aimed her implant at the old spears, shields, maces, and other pointy things on display. Only when the forklift gently dropped its cargo by a southern wall did our host turn with an extended hand.

“Major Gonzales and ditto Morris. You’re early. By several hours.”

“Are we? My fault then,” Clara said. “I’m operating on East Coast time these days.”

A dubious excuse. Still, the convenience of a real guest outweighs annoyance to any ditto, even the ditto of a trillionaire.

“Not at all. You two are busy people these days! Thanks for accepting my invitation. Though I imagine you had your own reasons for coming.”

“There are matters to discuss,” I agreed.

“No doubt. But first, how are the bodies working out?”

I glanced down at the one I wore today. Its buff shade of beige-gray, plus realistic hair and skin texture, pushed the tolerant edges of legality. But no one complained amid all the buzz about my “heroics.” I cared more about other features, those letting me smell and see and touch Clara with utter vividness.

“Impressive work. Must be expensive,”

“Very.” He nodded. “But that doesn’t matter if—”

The platinum golem flinched as one side of the shipping crate fell with a sharp bang. Servants moved on to the other panels.

“Naturally,” ditKaolin resumed, “you’ll be supplied with these hyperquality blanks, gratis, till the problem with your original is sorted out. Have there been any signs … ?”

“Plenty of signs. But none that say welcome.”

After two weeks of expert study, it was evident that the mind/soul of realAlbert Morris had “gone away” in some fashion no one understood. Yosil Maharal might have explained. But he too was gone, even more decisively.

“Well, you can count on Universal Kilns. Either until it becomes possible to reload to your original, or else …”

“Or else till I pass my limit at performing ditto-to-ditto transfers.”

He nodded. “We’ll help with hyperquality blanks and the experimental golem-prolongation process. In part because we owe a debt—”

“You sure do,” Clara muttered.

The shiny golem winced. “Though in exchange, my technicians naturally wish to monitor your remarkable endurance. No one else ever achieved such fidelity, imprinting from one animated doll to another!”

I noticed Kaolin’s right hand quiver slightly. If anything, he was downplaying his eagerness.

“Hm, yes. Monitoring. That may present a problem if—” I stopped as Kaolin’s servants finally broke apart the shipping box, liberating a heavy crystal display cabinet. Within stood the dun brown figure of a small, well-built man — a soldier with Asiatic features, hand-molded and kiln-fired roughly two thousand years ago. His confident half smile seemed almost alive.

“Only ten of the Sian terracottas have left China,” ditKaolin breathed happily. “I’ll keep this one here to honor my late friend Yosil. Till his heir returns to claim it.”

The tycoon clearly didn’t expect that to happen any time soon, though I saw a portrait of Ritu Maharal prominently displayed atop the grand piano. Had it been deliberately moved there as a gesture?

My “memory” of this room came from a voice-recording Clara found under Urraca Mesa, inside the shattered Albert gray who was kidnapped from this very estate, subjected to cruel torments, then assigned to serve as a “mirror” in that bizarre experiment. Fortunately, the gray’s diary spool survived the culminating explosion, offering a compulsive sotto voce recitation about the murderous activities of a mad ghost. Another recording spool, removed from realAlbert’s neck, offered a sporadic, low-quality transcription of a few more puzzle-piece events — a roadside ambush, desert treks, and underground betrayals, shedding some light on how Yosil’s daughter got involved.

How much more convenient if all three versions of us had been able to recombine memories at the end! As things stood, Clara and I had to rely on old-fashioned detective work.

“Have they made any progress treating Ritu’s condition?”

“Just diagnostic work. Contact’s been made with the Beta personality. Doctors are probing for any more siblings lying dormant within.” Kaolin gave a melancholy sigh. “None of this would have happened before the age of golemtech. Surely not the original tragic blunder Yosil inflicted on Ritu as a child. And even if she did still get a divided-personality syndrome, it would never have manifested so powerfully in the outer world. Who would ever expect such a character as Beta to emerge and—”

“Oh, spare us,” Clara interrupted.

We turned to see her examining the Sian soldier, one warrior to another. But her attention to our conversation never drifted.

“You knew about Beta for years,” she added. “You found it convenient to maintain a relationship with one so uncannily skilled at deception. Someone able to consistently fool the World Eye! One of the last brilliant underworld figures, and you were in a position to blackmail him into doing all sorts of favors, because Beta was ultimately vulnerable at the source. Come on, admit it.”

Platinum fists tightened, but anger was futile. As realAlbert’s assigned guardian and my nominal owner, Clara had legal standing. I was her adviser, not the other way around.

“I … admit no such thing.”

“Then let’s investigate. Subpoena cam-records going back years, interview employees under the Henchman Law. Heck, it won’t take much for me to interest the national security apparat, now that—”

“—of course speaking hypothetically,” Kaolin rushed in. “For the sake of argument, suppose I did have prior dealings with the figure known as Beta. You’d scour forever without finding a single genuine criminal act on my part. Sure, I may have committed a few civil torts … all right, maybe a lot of those. Gineen Wammaker and some other perverts could sue for copyright damages.