“Mr. Morris—”

It was little more than a moist croak, barely audible above the nucleoelectric whine. Trying not to touch anything, I bent close to the dying woman. Her pale complexion was splotchy and pitted with small pimples. For once, I was glad not to be able to smell.

“Albert—”

This wasn’t a person I could like very much. Still, her suffering was genuine and she deserved pity, I suppose.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” I asked, wondering when the machinery was timed to unleash all this pent-up force. It might not be safe to stand there.

“I … heard … what you said …”

“What, about karma and all that? Look, I’m no priest. How should I know—”

“No … you’re right …” She gasped for breath between words. “Behind the bar … unscrew the ketone cap … get the son of … son of a …”

Her eyelids fluttered.

“Better get outta there, buddy-boy,” Palloid urged. He was already standing in the doorway with sunshine on his back. I hurried off the dais to join him, glancing back in time to see an eruption of soft lightnings start to flash. Irene’s body convulsed. So did the surrounding cluster of red golems, in perfect synchrony. It wouldn’t be long now.

Retreating to the alley, we looked up at the other commotion, going on atop the van. Irene’s final ditto, the one who was about to be orphaned, clutched at the big antenna, sobbing quite realistically while Horus held her by an ankle. He, in turn, clung to the cargo rack, trying to drag her off.

“Let go!” he shouted angrily. “You’ll wreck it! Do you have any idea how long I saved to buy a franchise—”

Palloid leaped onto my shoulder as I stepped away, putting more distance between us and … whatever was about to happen.

Thunder seemed to boom within the back room of the Rainbow Lounge, like a pulsing of drums … or maybe a million giant bullfrogs with bad thyroid conditions. All right, comparisons fail me, but anyone born in this century would recognize the bass cadence of a hugely amplified Standing Wave. Perhaps a ponderous caricature, impressive but lacking subtlety. Or else a colossally augmented version of the real thing. Who could tell which?

Irene may be able to tell … in a few seconds.

Her final golem wailed on the roof of the van, fighting the tug of Horus in order to thrust her head in front of the antenna.

“Don’t leave me!” she moaned. “Don’t leave me behind!”

Palloid commented dryly, “I didn’t think worker ants were s’pozed to care so much about their individual selves.”

“I was just wondering the same thing,” I replied. “Maybe the hive metaphor isn’t right, after all. The human personality best suited to her way of life is all ego. She could never let go of even a small part of herself. I guess being large can be just as addictive as—”

Pal’s ditto interrupted, “Here it comes!”

We retreated down the alley till I felt the fence against my back, then stared as a sharp light spilled through the rear doors of the Rainbow Lounge, from the chamber where Irene and her copies lay.

The light seared, casting shadows even across daylit asphalt. Instinctively, I raised a hand for shade.

The struggle atop the van ended as Horus fell to the ground with a yelp. The very same moment, something surged along those superconducting cables. The final red ditto screamed, grappling the antenna desperately, causing the mounts to creak as that glittering surge enveloped the van. Spark-flecked aurorae covered both her and the dish … even as her weight bore on the delicate apparatus, causing it to groan -

A visible beam shot forth, blasting through the clay body, which shivered, quickly hardening and sloughing off chunks, then overturned into the delicate parabola, bearing it down, shearing the metal support bolts with staccato pops. I watched with Pal — and poor Horus howled — as the antenna turned … then toppled over the side of the van.

A soundless, blinding wave spread outward, like a radiant ripple of pure light. It washed over Pallie and me, driving tremors up my back. Both of my ears popped, loudly and painfully. Arcing static discharges followed the wavefront, blowing the back doors off the van and clouds of equipment into the street.

The transmission finished, not aimed toward the cosmos above, but into the floor of a gritty alley.

Horus slumped, moaning in despair till all was silent.

“You know, Gumby,” my small ferret-shaped friend muttered from his perch on my shoulder, when we were both finally able to stir from dazzled shock over the spectacle. “You know, this city is built on some rich layers of pure clay. It’s one reason Aeneas Kaolin built his first animation lab here, long ago. So it’s not too far-fetched to imagine—”

“Shut up, Pal.” I didn’t want to share whatever perverse notion had just occurred to him. Anyway, the smoke was clearing and I saw no sign of fire. Nobody would prevent us from going back inside the Rainbow Lounge.

“Come on,” I said, rubbing my jaw, which hurt below the ears. “Let’s see what parting gift Irene left for us.”

“Hm? What’re you talking about?”

I wasn’t sure. Had she said “ketone cap”? Or something about atonement?

Anyway, I tried not to think ill of Irene. Despite all she had done, it just didn’t seem right. Especially when we crept inside, passing both a barbecued ruin on the dais and surrounding supine heaps of smoldering brick statuary.

I had never seen anyone die quite so thoroughly before.

Yosil Maharal — or rather his gray ghost — appears to be quite proud of his private collection: starting with a unique hoard of cuneiform tablets and cylinder seals from ancient Mesopotamia, the muddy land where writing began more than four thousand years ago.

“This was the very first kind of magic that actually worked in a reliable and repeatable way,” he told me, holding up an object the shape and hue of a dinner roll, covered with shallow, overlapping wedge incisions. “At last, a kind of immortality could be achieved by anybody who learned the new trick of recording their words and thoughts and stories, by marking impressions in wet clay. The immortality of speaking across time and space, even long after your original body returned to dust.”

I may be no genius but I grasped his allusion. For he was just such a manifestation of continuity beyond death. A complex cluster of soul-impressions made in clay, speaking on after the original Yosil Maharal had his organic life snuffed out near a lonely culvert, under a desert highway. No wonder he felt a sense of kinship with the little tablets.

Maharal’s private collection also includes samples of ancient hand-wrought pottery, like several large amphorae — containers that held wine in a Roman bireme that sank two thousand years ago — recently recovered by explorerdits from the bottom of the Mediterranean. And nearby, in the same display case, lay a setting of rare blue porcelain dinnerware, once carried around the Horn of Africa in the belly of a clipper ship to grace the table of some rich merchant.

Even more precious to my host were several fist-sized human effigies, from an era much earlier than Rome or Babylon. A time before towns or literacy, when all our ancestors roamed roofless, in hunter-gatherer tribes. One by one, Yosil’s gray golem lovingly displayed about a dozen of these “Venus” figurines, molded out of Neolithic river mud, all of them featuring voluminous breasts and copious hips that tapered down from generous thighs to the daintiest of feet. With evident pride, he told me where each little statuette was found and how old it was. Lacking clear faces, most of them looked enigmatic. Anonymous. Mysterious. And prodigiously female.