Like a container — or several — spilling over at the rim, I fill up.

My only desire? To empty all these vessels that I am!

The urge to reunite … to recombine … to rejoin, overwhelms me.

But which me?

What me?

Why, when, and where me?

All the famed journalistic double-U questions, turning around to bite the reporter.

Double-U. Double-yous. Identical, yet different. For one of me knows things the other doesn’t.

One has seen clay jars from shipwrecks two thousand years old. Mother- or whore-goddess figures that were molded out of river mud twenty millennia ago. Wedgelike symbols, pressed by hand, way back when hands first learned to scribble thoughts …

One has seen all those things. The other me writhes, wondering where all these images are coming from. Not memories, but fresh, immanent, experience in the raw and actual.

I know what Maharal is doing. How could I not know?

Yet the aim of all this torment remains obscure. Has he gone mad? Do all dittos face the same fate when they become ghosts, cast adrift without the anchor of a soul-home?

Or is he exploring a new way for the Standing Wave to vibrate? Multifariously.

I do feel less like an individual actor. More like an entire cast. An arena.

I am a forum.

Ack! This isn’t at all like the familiar sensation of inloading we all know — passively absorbing memories as a soul-wave replica flows back to combine with the original. Instead, two waves seem to stand in parallel, gray and red but equal in status, both interfering and reinforcing, jostling toward mutual coherence …

And droning in the background, like a bad tour guide or a hated lecturer, the voice of ditYosil tells me, over and over again, that observers make the universe. Oh, he teases and taunts with every rising throb of the salmon reflex, urging me to “go home” to a self-base that longer exist.

“Answer me a riddle, Morris,” my tormentor asks.

“How can you be in two places at once, when you’re not anywhere at all?”

The golem with the tan spiral offered some personal recollections to prove he was Beta … things only he and Albert Morris should know from past encounters between two adversaries. Actions, deceptions, insults, and secret details from times when I barely escaped his clutches — or he mine.

“It sounds like you two have been engaged in an ongoing role-claying game,” remarked Lum.

“A childish one,” commented the soul-conservative, Gadarene.

“Perhaps,” Beta’s ditto answered. “But a game with serious money at stake. One reason I had to expand my business was in order to set aside enough cash to pay off the accumulating fines. In case Albert here finally caught the real me.”

“Don’t blame Albert for your career as a ditnapping thief,” I grumbled. “Anyway, I’d wager everything I own that you’ve got bigger troubles now. A whole lot worse than civil liens for copyright violation. You’ve attracted new enemies, haven’t you? More dangerous than any local private eye.”

Beta conceded the point with a nod. “For months, I felt a hot breath on my neck. One by one, my operations were meticulously targeted by someone who would break in suddenly, using prion bombs to slaughter my copies — and the templates I’d stolen — or else he’d take over the operation for a few days, before burning it all to cover the evidence.”

“Huh. That explains something that happened at the Teller Building,” I commented. “On Monday, you temporarily captured my green scout. At least I thought it was you. But my captors seemed more vicious, even kind of frantic. They actually tried using torture—”

“That wasn’t me,” Beta assured grimly.

“Hm, well, I escaped, barely. And on Tuesday morning I returned with Inspector Blane and some LSA enforcers to raid the joint. That went well. But later, around back of the building, I ran into a decaying yellow who claimed to be you, muttering something about how a competitor was ‘taking over.’

“Do you have any idea who’s been doing all this?”

“At first I suspected you, Morris. Then I realized it had to be someone really competent—” Beta glanced at me, but I refused the bait, keeping a poker face. So the sardonic ditto resumed. “Someone who was able to track down my clandestine copying centers, one by one, despite every precaution. As a desperate measure, I used my best evasion methods to stash emergency backups in secret portakilns, programmed to thaw after some delay.”

“You are one of those pre-imprinted copies?” Lum asked. “How old are your memories? When were you made?”

Beta’s ditto grimaced. “More than two weeks ago! I might have stayed dormant in that tiny niche forever, if Albert’s news hadn’t arrived, triggering reanimation. At that point, I contacted Mr. Montmorillin here, who kindly invited me to this meeting.” The spiral golem indicated Pal.

I sat up. “You say, ‘Albert’s news—’ ”

The other realperson present, James Gadarene, stomped a foot. “Whoa! First let’s establish something, this Beta person, a notorious underworld figure, really was engaged in a plot with ‘Queen’ Irene and Gineen Wammaker—”

“We haven’t yet determined if the maestra herself—”

Gadarene shot me a glare. Remembering my place, I grunted apologetically and shut up.

“So,” he resumed. “We’re expected to believe that Beta and Irene and Wammaker really were planning to invade UK in a semi-innocent effort to uncover hoarded technologies. Even if that’s true, I doubt they had the public’s benefit in mind. More likely extortion! A scheme to blackmail Aeneas Kaolin into buying their silence.”

Beta conceded with a shrug. “Cash is nice. We also wanted the new ditto-extension technique. Irene was running out of organic memory and needed to slow her inloads. Wammaker and I saw commercial benefits to extending the duration of our copies — her legal ones and my pirated rip-offs.” Beta laughed. “Our alliance was one of temporary convenience.”

“Never mind that.” Gadarene leaned forward. “In order to carry out your espionage mission, you planned to hire your ongoing nemesis, Ditective Albert Morris. Wasn’t that risky?”

Beta nodded. “It’s why I pretended to be that Vic Collins character. Anyway, why not hire Albert? The job suited his abilities.”

“Only some enemy hunted you down first. He replaced you, then changed the aim of the mission. Is that what we’re expected to believe?”

A high-pitched version of Pal’s voice called from a table nearby. The little ferret-golem — Palloid — manipulated a holo viewer. “I’ve got that film roll we found at Irene’s. Ready to show ’em what you discovered, Gumby?”

I nodded. Images erupted from the viewer, showing a series of clandestine meetings in limousines, between Irene and her confederates. I told the others about my close-in analysis of the plaid dye patterns worn by “Vic Collins.”

Beta grinned at the compliment when I said, “That was a neat trick, using tiny pixel emitters to change your skin motifs in a flash. It explains how you slipped my grasp a number of times. Apparently, your enemy didn’t know about the technique. Or else he didn’t care. Because when he took over, he just copied your latest dye job and moved right in. Irene never noticed.