The interior of the Rainbow Lounge lay eerily empty.

Some holoflashers had been left on, illuminating the dance floor and the Grudge Pit with twisted images, like multidimensional Dalí landscapes roamed by erotic figures possessing far too many limbs. But without the intense background beat of CeramoPunk music, the flickering shapes were rather pathetic. This place demanded crowding — a hot press of several hundred brightly colored bodies, hyped to wear their standing waves exposed, ultrasensitive, like the prickly emotions of teenagers.

“I wonder who’s gonna take over the Rainbow,” Palloid mused. “Do you think Irene had heirs or left a will? Does it all go up for auction?”

“Why? Thinking of becoming a tavernkeeper?”

“It’s tempting.” He leaped from my shoulder onto the bar, a broad expanse of heavily lacquered teakwood. “But maybe I don’t have the personality for it.”

“You mean the patience, concentration, or tact,” I commented while poking around. The bar featured a dazzling array of tubes, faucets, bottles, and dispensers of intoxicants, euphorics, stimulants, levelers, speeders, slowers, uppers, downers, horizoners, myopics, stigmatics, zealotropics, hystericogens -

“Touché, Albert. Though Irene’s idea of tact was rather specialized. The kind used by pimps, bouncers, and cops. Screw ’em all.”

“Nihilist,” I muttered while scanning labels for a dizzying array of concoctions. My search wasn’t going to be easy. The varieties of abuse that you can put a clay body through never cease to amaze me, and almost certainly astonished the inventors of dittotech, back when people started fiddling with home modification kits. You can fine-tune a golem so it will react spectacularly to alcohol or acetone, electric or magnetic fields, sonic or radar stimulation, images or aromatics … not to mention a thousand specially designed pseudoparasites. In other words, you can pound, pluck, or molest the Standing Wave in countless ways that would be lethal to your real body, and transfer home vivid memories when the busy day is done.

No wonder there are experience addicts. By comparison, the opiate-alkaloid cocktails that sad folks used to inject in Grandpa’s day were like a dose of vitamins.

“Nihilist? You dare call me that? Who’s standing here, using up lifespan helping you, friend?”

“You call it help to squat up there, kibitzing? How about some assistance down here, behind the bar?”

He replied with a desultory snarl, but did leap to ground at the far end, sniffing as he scanned labels, grumbling audibly that I owed him for this. I wasn’t buying any of his act, of course. My friend’s personal addiction was to poke away at the world’s weirdness. After events of the last hour, he never seemed happier.

I hope he gets to inload all this, I thought, recalling the real Pal, imprisoned in his life-sustaining chair. He’d get a kick out of remembering old Horus, toppling onto his butt from the Final Options van. Pal might also help distract Clara from her grief by describing how we spent these haunted hours …

No, I shied away from thinking about her. Anyway, Clara would remember Albert with fondness. That beat most kinds of immortality that I’d heard of. A lot more immortality than this particular green frankie was going to get.

Anyway, who wants to live forever?

I kept marveling at the variety of substances stored behind the bar. Irene must’ve had real political clout, to get an environmental variance. There are more toxic brews here than in the late state of Delaware.

“Got it!” Palloid announced, punctuating his triumph with a smug somersault. I hurried over to his end of the bar where a series of large wooden pull levers stood — like those used to serve draft beer in a real people tavern. One of them bore a designation that said: Ketone Kocktail.

“Hm, could be. If she had said, ‘ketone tap.’ ”

“Are you sure she said ‘cap’?”

“Pretty sure.” I jiggled the pull lever, not eager to dispense any of the pressurized contents. My cheap green body — even renewed under artificial dyes of orange and gray — couldn’t endure most of the exotic mixtures offered for sale here.

“The cap—” Palloid began.

“I know. I’m checking it now.” The lever had a large decorative tip, like a tapered brass tube covering the end. I twisted one way, then the other. It gave a little, then no more. Even when I wrenched hard.

I was about to give up, then thought, Maybe it works in several successive directions, like a Chinese puzzle box.

I tried combinations of twists, pulls, and shoves, and began making some progress with the cap, confirming my guess. Gradually it worked outward along a complicated, grooved sleeve. A physical storage device, then, like the piezomechanical recorders that Albert always installed in his grays. More secure than anything electronic. Irene clearly grasped that the world of digital data is far too flighty to entrust with any real secrets. Safety-through-encryption is a bad joke. If you must keep something away from prying eyes, put it in hardwriting. Then hide the only copy in a box.

I hope this thing doesn’t require any sort of ID check, or involve disarming a self-destruct. When Irene told me about this cache with her final words, I assumed it was an act of deathbed contrition — or perhaps a little karmic insurance. But another explanation was possible. A trap. A petty act of vengeance for interfering with her last red ditto.

If I could sweat, I would have started right about then.

“Better step back, Pal,” I urged.

“Already done it, chum,” I heard him call from beyond the farthest end of the bar, over a dozen meters removed. “Other than that, I’m with you all the way.”

His wry expression of support almost made me chuckle. Almost.

I didn’t breathe through the last several twists and turns, operating on storage cells until …

… the brass cylinder came off at last, revealing a hollow interior with something crammed inside. Exhaling with relief, I tapped it on the bar.

A slim tube of plastic rolled out. Beta, said a paper tag, attached to the film with a clip.

“Cool!” Palloid yelped, leaping onto the bar again, using agile paw-hands to pry at other decorative caps. “I bet she had all kinds of stuff hidden away. Maybe Irene had a sideline, blackmailing politicians! She was in the business of catering to perversions and there’s still lots of depravities that can cost you votes, if people find out about ’em!”

“Right. Dream on.” As if Pallie cared about politics. “Just be careful,” I urged. It was my turn to retreat cautiously while he fiddled with one poison dispenser after another. Further warnings would be futile, so I left him there, happily risking his brief existence on a whim.

“I’ll be in Irene’s office,” I said.

We had passed it along the way, a sophisticated-looking data center offering surveillance views into every corner of the establishment. (I chuckled when I saw Palloid barely dodge a spray of some fuming liquid as he kept poking around, looking for more secret hiding places.) There were also some of those hookups the luckless grayAlbert mentioned in his recital-diary — plug-in units designed to let a ditto link directly (well, sort of) to computers. From everything I’ve read, the advantages are dubious. I’d much rather wear a chador.

Luckily, the office held some regular net-access consoles, too. Irene had left several turned on, indicating rushed departure. I might not have to mess with passwords and such. Hacking is such a retro and tedious chore.

Anyway, my first stop was a simple analog strip reader. The film tube fit perfectly. Are there any clues here to explain why someone arranged for that vicious attack against Universal Kilns? Or the much worse felony of real-killing Albert Morris?