Clear.

She gets dressed. A thermal spray, first, then a kind of gold mesh over her breasts and down to mid-thigh. Nothing else. Nipples showing through the openings in the mesh. Not much hidden below, either. Not my idea of winter clothing. Androids must enjoy winters more than we do.

Want to see yourself before we go out, Alpha Leaper?

Yes.

She dumps mirror-dust in the air. When the molecules are lined up I get a head-to-toe view. Impressive. A really cocky alpha buck, a red devil out on the town. Lilith is right: no gamma would dare to fool with me. Or even look me in the eye.

Let’s go, Alpha Leaper. Slumming in Gamma Town.

Out. Across. To the edge of the city, looking down on windwhipped gray water. Whitecaps in the harbor. Early afternoon, but night already closing in; a greasy gray time of day, fog hanging low, the glow of streetlamps coming through it blurred and dirty. Other lights flashing off buildings or floating overhead: red, green, blue, orange, flickering on and off, yelling for attention, an arrow here, the sign of a trumpet there. Vibrations. Fumes. Sounds. The closeness of many people. A screech in the grayness. Distant laughter, blurred also. Odd scraps of voices drifting in the fog:

“Let go or I’ll clot you!”

“Back to the vat. Back to the vat.”

“Slobies, who’ll take slobies?”

“Slobies!”

“Owl! Owl! Owl!”

Stockholm is more than half populated by androids. Why do they gather here? And in maybe nine other cities. Ghettoes. They don’t have to. Transmat world: live wherever you like, get to work anyway. But we like to be with our own kind, she says. And even so they stratify themselves in their ghettoes. The alphas back there, in the fine old houses, and the betas in the ragbag middle. And then the gammas. The gammas. Welcome to Gamma Town.

Wet slippery mud-streaked cobble-paved streets. Medieval? Peeling gray houses face to face, hardly a lane between them. A trickle of cold dirty water running down the gutter from the higher part. Windows of glass. And yet it isn’t completely archaic here: a mixture of styles, all sorts of architecture, olla podrida, bouillabaisse, with twenty-second, twentieth, nineteenth, sixteenth, fourteenth centuries jumbled together. The airy webs of weather-proofed skyways dangling. Rusted slidewalks on a few of the tangled streets. The buzz of climate conditioners that have gone out of phase, pumping greenish fog into the winter air. Thick-walled baroque cellars. Lilith and I walk down zigzag crazy pathways. A demon must have planned this town. The imp of the perverse.

Faces hover.

Gammas. Everywhere. They peer, flit, peer again. Little dim eyes, birdlike, twitch — twitch — twitch — frightened. Afraid of us, they are. The social distances, eh? They keep the social distances. They lurk, they stare, but as we get close they try to be invisible. Head down. Eyes averted. Alphas alphas alphas; all gammas beware!

We tower above them. I never realized how squat gammas are. How short, how broad. And how strong. Those shoulders. Those muscles rippling. Any of them could rip me apart. The women look strong too, though they’re built more gracefully. To go to bed with a gamma girl? More fire than Lilith, maybe — is that possible? Thrashing and jumping around, low-class groaning, no inhibitions? And the smell of garlic, no doubt. Forget the idea. Coarse, they are. Coarse. Like Quenelle with my father, I’d say. Let them be; there’s passion enough in Lilith, and she’s clean. Probably not worth the effort even to think about it. The gammas keep back from us. Two jaunty alphas out on the town. We have long legs. We have style. We have grace. They fear us.

I am Alpha Leviticus Leaper.

The wind is raw here. Right off the water it comes, knife-sharp. It stirs up dust and bits of things in the streets. Dust! Scraps! When have I seen such filthy streets? Don’t the robocleaners ever come here? Well, then, don’t the gammas have enough pride to clean their own?

They don’t care about such things, says Lilith. It’s a cultural matter. They take pride in their unpride. It reflects their lack of status. Bottom of the android world, bottom of the bottom of the human world, and they know it, and they don’t like it, and the squalor is like a badge of nonstatus for them. Saying, you want us to be filth, we’ll live in filth too. Reveling in it. Wallowing in it. If we’re not people, we don’t have to be tidy at home. You know, robocleaners used to come here and the gammas would dismantle them. There’s one now, you see? Been there ten years, at least.

Robot fragments lie in a drab scattered heap. Shards of a metal man. The glint of good blue metal through the rust. Are those things solenoids? Relays? Accumulators? The coiled wire guts of the machine. Bottom of the bottom of the bottom, a mere mechanical object, destroyed while attacking the holy squalor of our vat-born pariahs. A gray and white cat pisses on the robot’s guts. The gammas leaning against the wall laugh. Then they see us and creep back, showing awe. They make quick nervous gestures with their left hands — touch crotch, touch breasts, touch forehead, one two three very fast. As automatic, as much a reflex, as the sign of the Cross. What is it? A kind of honorific tugging at the forelock? A show of homage to the wandering alphas?

Something like that, says Lilith. But not quite. Actually it’s just a superstitious sign they make.

To ward off the evil eye?

Yes. In a manner of speaking. Touch the cardinal points, invoke the spirit of the genitals and souls and intelligence, crotch chest skull. You’ve never seen androids do it before?

I think maybe I have.

Even alphas, Lilith says. A habit. A comfort when tension. Sometimes even I.

Why the genitals, though? When androids don’t genitate?

Symbolic power, she says. We’re sterile but that’s still a holy zone. In memory of the origin of us all. The human gene pool issued from the loins, and we were designed after those genes. There’s a theology of it.

I make the sign. One two three. Lilith laughs, but she looks edgy, as if I really shouldn’t be doing it. To hell with. I’m masquerading as an android tonight, right? Then I can do android things. One two three.

The gammas lounging against the wall return the sign. One two three. Crotch chest skull.

One of them says something that sounds like, Krug be praised!

What was that? I ask Lilith.

I didn’t hear it.

Did he say Krug be praised?

Gammas will say anything sometimes.

I shake my head. Maybe he recognizes me, Lilith!

Not a chance. Absolutely none. If he said anything about Krug, he means your father.

Yes. Yes. True. He’s Krug. I’m Manuel, only Manuel.

Shh! You’re Alpha Leviticus Leaper!

Right. Sorry. Alpha Leviticus Leaper. Lev for short. Krug be praised? Maybe I didn’t hear it right.

Maybe, Lilith says.

We turn a sharp corner and in so doing we trigger an advert trap. By entering the trap’s scanner field we cause powders of many colors to erupt from vents in a wall and form, by electrostatic attraction, a pattern of gaudy words in the air, blindingly bright even in the murk and fog. Against a silvery backdrop we see:

I ask, Is he really an alpha?