"For sex ?" I must sound faintly scandalized, or shocked or something, because Jen's face relaxes into a mask of amusement.

"Only with your husband, darling." She sips her coffee and looks at me calculatingly. "That's something else we've noticed. I don't want to hurry you or anything, but . . ."

"Who I fuck is none of your business," I say flatly. My coffee arrives, but right now I'm not feeling thirsty. My mouth tastes as dry and acrid as if I've just chewed half a kilogram of raw caffeine. "I'll dress up for the Church meeting and say I'll be good and do whatever else you want me to do in public. And I'll try not to cost you any points. But." I tap the table in front of Jen's coffee cup, insultingly close. "You will not, ever , tell me whom I may associate with or what I will do with my chosen associates. Or with whom I have sex." The silence grows icicles. I take an unwisely large gulp of hot coffee and burn the roof of my mouth. "Do I make myself clear?"

"Quite clear, darling." Jen's eyes glitter like splinters of frozen malice.

I make myself smile. "Now, shall we find something civilized to talk about while we drink our coffee and eat our pastries?"

"I think that would be a good idea," says Angel. She looks slightly shaken. "After lunch, how about we buy you something suitable to wear to Church?" She asks me. "Just in case. Meanwhile, I was wondering if you've used your washing machine yet? It has some interesting features . . ." And she's off into an exploration of techniques for gaining points in the women's world, generated by game theory and policed by mutual scorefile surveillance.

BY the end of our lunch, I think I've got a handle on them. Angel means well but is too calculatedly fearful for her own good. She's afraid of stepping out of line, unwilling to jeopardize her score, and worried about what people will think of her. This combination makes her an easy target for Jen, who is flamboyant and aggressively extroverted on the outside, but uses it to conceal an insecure need for approval, which leads her to bully people until they give it to her. She's as ruthless as anyone I can recall meeting since my memory surgery, and I've met some hardcases around the clinic. The surgeon-confessors tend to attract such. (What's even more disturbing is that I have faint ghost-recollections of knowing similar people before, but with no details attached. Who they were or what they meant to me has sunk into the abyss where memories go when their owners no longer need them.)

The two of them, working by unspoken assent, appoint themselves as my personal shopping assistants for the afternoon. They're not crude about it, but they're very persistent and make no real attempt to conceal their desire to modify my behavior along lines compatible with their enhanced scorefiles.

After coffee and cakes (for which Angel pays), they escort me to a series of establishments. In the first of these I am subjected to the attentions of a hairstylist. Angel sits with me and chats interminably about kitchen appliances while Jen goes off somewhere to do something of her own, and the zombie immobilizes me and applies a fearsome array of knives, combs, chemical reagents, and compact machine tools to my head. Once I get out of the chair, I have to admit that my hair's different—it's still long, but it's several shades lighter, and whenever I turn my head it moves like a solid lump of foamed plastic.

"Perhaps we should get you some clothing for tomorrow," Jen says, smiling broadly. It's phrased as a suggestion, but the way she says it makes it an order. They lead me through a series of boutiques, where I am induced to present my credit card. She insists that I try on the costume, and while I'm showing her how it looks, Angel gets the store zombies to parcel up my stuff. I end up looking like one of them, the ladies who lunch. "We're getting there," Jen says, something almost like approval on her face. "You need a makeover, though."

"A what?"

They just laugh at me. Probably just as well; if they told me in advance, I'd try to escape. And, as I keep reminding myself (with an increasing sense of dread), I'll have nearly a hundred tendays—three years—in which to regret any mistakes I make today.

THE lights are turning red and sinking toward the tunnel at the edge of the world when the taxi we're crammed into stops outside my house, and the door opens. "Go on," says Angel, pushing my bag at me, "goand surprise him. He'll have had a long day and will need cheering up." I realize she's using the generic he —they don't care who he is, all they care about is the fact that he's my husband, and we can earn them points.

"Okay, I'm going, I'm going," I say, harassed. I take the bag, and as I turn, something bites me on the leg. "Hey!" I look round but the taxi is already pulling away. "Shit," I mumble. My leg throbs. I reach down and feel something lumpy stuck in it. I pull it out. It's some sort of lozenge with a needle coming out of one end. "Shit." I stumble up the path in the new shoes they insisted I buy—the heels are steeper and less comfortable than the first pair—and in through the door. I dump the bags and head for the living room, where the TV is on. Sam is lying in front of it, his eyes closed and his tie loosened, and I feel a stab of compassion for him. The injection point on my leg aches, a cold reminder.

"Sam. Wake up !" I shake his shoulder. "I need your help!"

"Whu—" He opens his eyes and looks at me. "Reeve?" His pupils dilate visibly. I probably smell weird—Jen and Angel tried half the contents of a scent bar on me, for no reason I can fathom.

"Help." I sit down next to him and hike up my skirt to show him the mark on my thigh. "Look." I hold up the ampoule where he can see it. "They got me. What in seven shades of shit is that stuff?" My crotch is unnaturally sensitive and I feel slightly dizzy, worryingly relaxed and unstressed in view of what's just happened.

"It's—" He blinks. "I don't know. Who did this to you?"

"Jen and Angel. They dropped me off from a taxi and I think Angel got me with this thing as I left." I lick my lips. I'm feeling distinctly odd. "What do you think? Poison?"

"Maybe not," he says, staring at me. Then he picks up his tablet and pokes at it. "There," he says, holding it for me. "Must be their idea of fun."

I thrust my hands between my thighs and clamp them together, my eyes blurring as I read. My crotch is tingling. "It's a—huh!" Fury washes over me. "The bitches!"

Sam shakes his head. "I've had a really tiring day, but it sounds like you've had an exciting one. Coming home dressed like a—and your friends, spiking you for sexual arousal." He raises an eyebrow. "Why did they do that, do you suppose?" Sam can remain analytical and composed in the most trying situations. I wish I had half his grace under pressure.

"I—" I force myself to move my hands. "Bitches."

"What's going on, Reeve? Is the peer pressure really that compelling?" He sounds concerned, sympathetic.

"Yes." I grit my teeth. He's sitting too close to me, but I don't want to risk moving. The drug is hitting me hard in warm, tingly waves, and I'm afraid of leaving a damp patch on the sofa. "It's the social points. We knew the points were shared with our cohort, but there are extra compulsion mechanisms we didn't know about. Jen and Angel told me about them, but I didn't . . . shit. And then you can score points for . . . other activities."

"What other activities?" he asks gently.

"Use your imagination!" I gasp, and bolt for the bathroom.

SAM knocks on the bathroom door once, tentatively, as I'm lying in the bottom of the shower cubicle in a daze of lust, letting waves of hot water sluice over me like a tropical storm—Since when do I know what a tropical storm on Urth felt like? —and trying to feel clean. Part of me wants to invite him in, but I manage to bite my lip and stay silent. I guess I can cross Jen and Angel off my list of possible assassins, but I find myself fantasizing in the shower, fantasizing about getting them alone and the myriad revenges I'll take. I know these are just fantasies—you can't kill somebody more than once in this place, and once you've killed them, they're out of reach—but something in me wants to make them hurt, and not just because they've destroyed any chance of my ever having honest sex with this curiously introverted, thoughtful, bear of a husband I've acquired. So I work my arms to exhaustion on the weight machine down in the basement, then go to bed alone and uneasy.