knacker: a mix of fear, contempt, and hatred. In her wall cycled a silicrobe animation of a charming prodge and studly plug: scion and mate. I wondered if she'd offer to introduce them to Krazy Kat.

"Peej Grahame-Ballard," I said with all the respectful gravity I could muster, after flashing my credentials, "we have reason to believe that the terrorist splice known as Krazy Kat has fled to our bioregion after the recent thwarting of his plans in Chicago. Specifically, to the metroplex area. The Unit for Polypeptide Classification and Monitoring is counting on the cooperation of all your members in the hunt for the criminal. Should the cultivar in question make any attempt to contact your organization-should you even so much as hear a rumor regarding that individual-we insist that you immediately notify us."

Grahame– Ballard had been doing a slow burn during my speech and now boiled over. "Of course! So you can rush out and kill him! Without even a pretence of justice!"

"Justice is a word that applies only to the enfranchised, Peej. Need I remind you that for splices, we have a parallel, neatly graduated system of rules, rewards, and punishments, all formulated scientifically over many years by experts with efficiency and utilitarianism in mind. Owners are constrained from cruelty, abuse, and overwork, while splices are guaranteed food, shelter, and meaningful employment."

"It's slavery, pure and simple!"

"A word that has no application to any being other than a human, Peej. The transgenics are property, plain and simple, just like baseline milk cows or sheep."

"Creatures with up to forty-nine percent human genes are property?"

"I didn't make the laws, Peej. I just enforce them."

She snorted. "And as for abuses-why, I could show you the records of things that would penetrate even that armored skin of yours and make your stupid failsafe heart go into fibrillation!"

I thought about some of the things I had seen. "I sincerely doubt that, Peej."

"Every one of us should be ashamed to participate in such a system! Don't you ever feel ashamed?"

"Not when I'm doing my job, Peej."

Realizing she was getting nowhere with me, Grahame-Ballard seemed to deflate. "And your job now is to find and execute a noble creature who is plainly the moral and ethical and sentient equal of you or me… "

"Peej," I said, trying to keep calm, "you have not seen the bloody results of that 'noble creature's' brutal actions. I have."

"And who made him what he is? Mankind!"

I got wearily to my feet. "Peej, the Kat is one bad splice.

I advise you to use a long spoon when you dine with him."

"There are no bad splices, only bad owners."

"If you say so."

Back on the street I was silent for a while, letting Grahame-Ballard's rifkinesque memes percolate uneasily through my cortex.

After a few blocks, Sonny said, "We will now be staking out Peej Grahame Ballard? Perhaps you have surrepetitiously planted dustcams on her already?"

''What makes you say that?"

"Plainly you intend to catch her dining with Krazy Kat."

I had to replay the conversation in my head.

"Metaphor," I sighed.

"Thank you."

I met Xuly Beth that night in Hopcroft's Cockaigne.

In reality, of course, I was back in our apartment in Boston and she was off on assignment somewhere up in the Arctic, twiddling with icebergs or glaciers or some other such pleasantly nonsentient and tractable phenomenon. We made it a point when she was in the field to meet at least four times a week at one virtuality site or another. Our current favorite was Hopcroft's Cockaigne, with its candy mountains and sodapop rivers, peppermint trees and cottoncandy clouds. (Although I couldn't imagine coming here much more: not only was the construx starting to reveal its shallowness, but lately it reminded me too much of the strange reality humanity was making of baseline Earth!)

We were wearing our actual appearances, since we saw too little of each other lately to be bored by our real shapes and faces. A privacy filter insured that we were alone, despite the possibility that thousands of others might be wandering the same construx.

Sitting next to me on a bonbon rock soft as a sofa, Xuly Beth was finishing telling me about her day. "-so if this latest remediation works as well as the simulations project, the

average sea level should start to drop by a quarter-inch per year! Why, we can probably start to repopulate Bangladesh by the next decade!"

"Uh– huh, great… "

Xuly Beth brushed back her pastel-green, metal-threaded hair from her brow, revealing twin barometric bumps. Together with her current skin choice of blocky maculations, the bumps conjured up the image of a gawky, lovable juvenile giraffe.

"You haven't heard a word I've said, have you?"

"I'm sorry, Jewely-Xuly, really, I am. It's just that this business with the Kat is itching me worse than a dose of cryptoshingles. It's not like dealing with your average criminal, some two-fit holopero or leeson. There, you've got someone embedded in a societal matrix. You generally have a good idea of what such a person wants and how he'll go about getting it. But the Kat is a loner with no goal other than to cause as much disruption as possible. He could strike anywhere, anytime!"

"And doubting yourself like this is going to solve the case?"

"No, I guess not… "

Xuly Beth donned a look of concentration, fingering her meteorological head bumps in the way she had when she was really puzzling something out. After a minute or so she said, "How can the Kat cause trouble? By himself, with a gun or a bomb, he's just another lone mucker. If he wants maximal damage, he's got to involve others. In Chicago he had to co-opt that posse, the Roaches, to carry out his plans. Even if

he wants to release some deadly vector into the general population, he's got to find someone to batch it for him. He's no crick or watson himself, is he?"

"No, not as far as I know… "

"So if you just start shaking down all the criminal sources of such things, you're bound to run into a signal that leads back to the Kat!"

I let out a sigh rather more hopeful than not. "You're right, of course. I should have thought of that angle myself. Nothing's hopeless. I guess I was just letting the magnitude of the case get me down. Plus someone I had to interview today said some things that made me wonder why I do what I do."

Xuly Beth stood up. "I knew it. You're just not thinking straight because you're missing your little weather-girl. Well, she has just what you need… "

Xuly Beth disappeared, exiting the construx without even using a popup menu. In a few seconds she was back.

"I'm in my Sack, dear."

I didn't need to have my arm-or any other body part-twisted.

Breaking my neurolink to the telecosm, I found myself back in Boston. I took my Sack out of its maintenance rack, tickled it open, and climbed in.

You could have a strictly neuro-induced orgasm in virtuality, but for some strange reason-maybe lesser bandwidth, maybe something to do with sheldrakean fields-it just wasn't identical with a Sack-administered full-body experience.

Back in Cockaigne, Xuly Beth and I went into a naked-bodied clinch, fell to the ground, and began to tear up the turf. Back home and in the Arctic, two Sacks were thrashing.

I was sure that if the Unit for Polypeptide Classification and Monitoring knew that a side-effect of the somatic up-grade they insisted I have was heightened orgasms, they would have deducted something from my pay.

When the break finally came, it wasn't precisely from the criminal front. Rather, it was from an allied set of outcasts, self-exiled eccentrics despised by the majority of consensusmemed, post-reedpair citizens.