"Mom took me home and screamed herself raw, and I played it all very contrite, then walked over to the minimall so that I could buy some saline solution for my eyes, which were still as red as stoplights. We never spoke of it again, and on my sixteenth birthday, Mom gave me the keys to a Veddic Series 8, and the first thing I did was download new firmware for the antitheft transponder that killed it. Two months later, it was stolen. I haven't driven a Sony since."

Linda smiles and then purses her lips. "Unrehearsed enough?"

Art shakes his head. "Wow. What a story."

"Do you want to kiss me now?" Linda says, conversationally.

"I believe I do," Art says, and he does.

Linda pulls the back of his head to hers with one arm, and with the other, she half-shrugs out of her robe. Art pulls his shirt up to his armpits, feels the scorching softness of her chest on his, and groans. His erection grinds into her mons through his Jockey shorts, and he groans again as she sucks his tongue into her mouth and masticates it just shy of hard enough to hurt.

She breaks off and reaches down for the waistband of his Jockeys and his whole body arches in anticipation.

Then his comm rings.

Again.

"Fuck!" Art says, just as Linda says, "Shit!" and they both snort a laugh. Linda pulls his hand to her nipple again and Art shivers, sighs, and reaches for his comm, which won't stop ringing.

"It's me," Fede says.

"Jesus, Fede. What is it?"

"What is it? Art, you haven't been to the office for more than four hours in a week. It's going on noon, and you still aren't here." Fede's voice is hot and unreasoning.

Art feels his own temper rise in response. Where the hell did Fede get off, anyway? "So fucking what, Fede? I don't actually work for you, you know. I've been taking care of stuff offsite."

"Oh, sure. Art, if you get in trouble, I'll get in trouble, and you know exactly what I mean."

"I'm not in trouble, Fede. I'm taking the day off-why don't you call me tomorrow?"

"What the hell does that mean? You can't just 'take the day off.' I wrote the goddamned procedure. You have to fill in the form and get it signed by your supervisor. It needs to be documented. Are you trying to undermine me?"

"You are so goddamned paranoid, Federico. I got mugged last night, all right? I've been in a police station for the past eighteen hours straight. I am going to take a shower and I am going to take a nap and I am going to get a massage, and I am not going into the office and I am not going to fill in any forms. This is not about you."

Fede pauses for a moment, and Art senses him marshalling his bad temper for another salvo. "I don't give a shit, Art. If you're not coming into the office, you tell me, you hear? The VP of HR is going berserk, and I know exactly what it's about. He is on to us, you hear me? Every day that you're away and I'm covering for your ass, he gets more and more certain. If you keep this shit up, we're both dead."

"Hey, fuck you, Fede." Art is surprised to hear the words coming out of his mouth, but once they're out, he decides to go with them. "You can indulge your paranoid fantasies to your heart's content, but don't drag me into them. I got mugged last night. I had a near-fatal car crash a week ago. If the VP of HR wants to find out why I haven't been in the office, he can send me an email and I'll tell him exactly what's going on, and if he doesn't like it, he can toss my goddamned salad. But I don't report to you. If you want to have a discussion, you call me and act like a human goddamned being. Tomorrow. Good-bye, Fede." Art rings the comm off and snarls at it, then switches it off, switches off the emergency override, and briefly considers tossing it out the goddamned window onto the precious English paving stones below. Instead, he hurls it into the soft cushions of the sofa.

He turns back to Linda and makes a conscious effort to wipe the snarl off his face. He ratchets a smile onto his lips. "Sorry, sorry. Last time, I swear." He crawls over to her on all fours. She's pulled her robe tight around her, and he slides a finger under the collar and slides it aside and darts in for a kiss on the hollow of her collarbone. She shies away and drops her cheek to her shoulder, shielding the affected area.

"I'm not-" she starts. "The moment's passed, OK? Why don't we just cuddle, OK?"

Art was at his desk at O'Malley House the next day when Fede knocked on his door. Fede was bearing a small translucent gift-bag made of some cunning combination of rough handmade paper and slick polymer. Art looked up from his comm and waved at the door.

Fede came in and put the parcel on Art's desk. Art looked askance at Fede, and Fede just waved at the bag with a go-ahead gesture. Art felt for the catch that would open the bag without tearing the materials, couldn't find it immediately, and reflexively fired up his comm and started to make notes on how a revised version of the bag could provide visual cues showing how to open it. Fede caught him at it and they traded grins.

Art probed the bag's orifice a while longer, then happened upon the release. The bag sighed apart, falling in three petals, and revealed its payload: a small, leather-worked box with a simple brass catch. Art flipped the catch and eased the box open. Inside, in a fitted foam cavity, was a gray lump of stone.

"It's an axe-head," Fede said. "It's 200,000 years old."

Art lifted it out of the box carefully and turned it about, admiring the clean tool marks from its shaping. It had heft and brutal simplicity, and a thin spot where a handle must have been lashed once upon a time. Art ran his fingertips over the smooth tool marks, over the tapered business end, where the stone had been painstakingly flaked into an edge. It was perfect.

Now that he was holding it, it was so obviously an axe, so clearly an axe. It needed no instruction. It explained itself. I am an axe. Hit things with me. Art couldn't think of a single means by which it could be improved.

"Fede," he said, "Fede, this is incredible-"

"I figured we needed to bury the hatchet, huh?"

"God, that's awful. Here's a tip: When you give a gift like this, just leave humor out of it, OK? You don't have the knack." Art slapped him on the shoulder to show him he was kidding, and reverently returned the axe to its cavity. "That is really one hell of a gift, Fede. Thank you."

Fede stuck his hand out. Art shook it, and some of the week's tension melted away.

"Now, you're going to buy me lunch," Fede said.

"Deal."

They toddled off to Piccadilly and grabbed seats at the counter of a South Indian place for a businessmen's lunch of thali and thick mango lassi, which coated their tongues in alkaline sweetness that put out the flames from the spiced veggies. Both men were sweating by the time they ordered their second round of lassi and Art had his hands on his belly, amazed as ever that something as insubstantial as the little platter's complement of veggies and naan could fill him as efficiently as it had.

"What are you working on now?" Fede asked, suppressing a curry-whiffing belch.

"Same shit," Art said. "There are a million ways to make the service work. The rights-societies want lots of accounting and lots of pay-per-use. MassPike hates that. It's a pain in the ass to manage, and the clickthrough licenses and warnings they want to slap on are heinous. People are going to crash their cars fucking around with the 'I Agree' buttons. Not to mention they want to require a firmware check on every stereo system that gets a song, make sure that this week's copy-protection is installed. So I'm coopering up all these user studies with weasels from the legal departments at the studios, where they just slaver all over this stuff, talking about how warm it all makes them feel to make sure that they're compensating artists and how grateful they are for the reminders to keep their software up to date and shit. I'm modeling a system that has a clickthrough every time you cue up a new song, too. It's going to be perfect: the rights-societies are going to love it, and I've handpicked the peer review group at V/DT, stacked it up with total assholes who love manuals and following rules. It's going to sail through approval."