The Incubators.

The Incubators had figured in a previous case of mine, when I was still paired with K-mart. A new blight that affected only third-generation pumptrees from Hybritech had sprung up, and we suspected that the Incubators might have been somehow responsible for it. They had never exhibited any such terrorist inclinations before, but like most despised minorities, they were perpetual suspects whenever anything went wrong.

Since the metro relied on pumptrees and their enormous taproots for its water supply, there was immense pressure from the adminisphere to crack the case. So K-mart and I came down rather hard on the Incubators at the time. And what was worse, the misfits had been proven innocent, the

cause of the new plague eventually being traced to a mutant smut that was able to prey on hematic vegetation.

So when, a few days after Xuly Beth and I had had our morale-boosting talk and telefuck, an anonymous demon showing only bland metagrafix delivered a tip that the Incubators had recently done a big job for a secretive client, I was aware I wouldn't be welcomed back with open arms.

But I was used to that.

Sonny was wearing a Boston Scientific chassis shaped like a small tank with multiple tentacles and spray nozzles. I knew the unit was effective, but it looked ridiculous. Not that I cared, since the possibility of a real lead at last had me higher than a dose of Kiss-the-sky.

"Hey, Dalek," I said, "let's go visit some pariahs."

Sonny lumbered after me. "Certainly, Doctor What."

"That's 'Who.'"

"The advantages inherent in the fuzzy logic circuits of a Turing Level Four device necessarily involve the ability to compromise data in a creative manner."

The Incubators had taken over an abandoned antique petroleum storage tank on the waterfront. The property was currently contested and in limbo, as the legal mess from the collapse of the petroleum industry was still being sorted out, some decades after the fall. Sooner or later, the new owners would find a use for the land and the squatters would be kicked out. But right now, it was all theirs.

At the makeshift sphincter door in the side of the tank facing the harbor, Sonny and I paused. "Stay out here and watch my back," I told the kibe.

"An instruction with contradictory semantics which I am fully capable of rationalizing."

I shook my head ruefully.

Cleaned up with Transcell Scrubbing Bubbles, the inside of the tank bore little residual scent. What it did smell like was a combination of mold, decay, dirty bandages, and sick breath.

And one additional, puzzling underscent that I couldn't quite place, even with my enhanced senses.

Dimly lit by scattered bioluminescent globes stuck here and there from floor to domed ceiling, the interior of the tank was filled with a mockcoral scaffolding.

From the organically fractal scaffolding hung the Incubators, in their various slings and cocoons, like basal gypsy-moth larvae in their tents.

I boosted my vision, but couldn't spot anyone down at my level. So I shouted up, "Protein Police! Is Smallpox here?"

There was no answer, but I saw a shifting among the calcite girders. A figure began to descend.

A lot of the members of the Incubators were immobilized by their perpetual, modified, nonconsuming diseases. That's why I had called for Smallpox, who had been one of the relatively active ones last time. (They were all noncontagious, though. Their propathogen ideology, however dogmatic, didn't extend to the point where they would have provoked a martyring backlash from the public.)

At last the climbing figure reached the floor and began to approach, limping in rags. I could see that it was indeed the riddled and cratered Smallpox.

"What do you want?" the pathogen-host demanded. "Can't you just let us cultivate our smallchain, low-gnomic refugees in peace? Isn't it bad enough that you high-gnomic imperialists have wiped the globe clean of so many innocent invisible lifeforms? Do you have to persecute our pitiful rescue mission too?"

"Listen, Smallpox, I don't care what you and Leprosy and Syphilis and Measles and Mumps and Polio and all the rest of your sick crew do with your own lives. But when I hear that you might be supplying contaminants to a bigtime terrorist, that's when you've crossed the line."

Smallpox cringed. "We didn't supply anybody with anything."

"Oh, no? That's not what I heard."

Smallpox turned to leave. "Go away," he muttered. "You can't prove anything."

I grabbed the small man by his rags, picked him up, and stuck my face into his raddled visage.

"Listen, my friend-how would you like to be cured?"

Smallpox blanched. "You-you wouldn't!"

"Try me."

"You murderer!" He began to kick. "All right, put me down, I'll talk."

I did, but kept alert for any funny moves.

"We have to earn a little eft somehow, you know," Smallpox began to whine. "And not many people will deal with us. So when we were approached with this assignment, we could hardly refuse. And besides, it was a technical challenge right up our alley."

"How's that?"

"This character-now, understand, I never actually saw him, so I couldn't know he was a baddie-kibes conducted the whole business-anyway, this plug wanted us to create a fast-acting, orally administered prion-based vector that would take up residence in the thalamus and upset the Llinas function."

I couldn't believe my ears. The Llinas function was the evolutionarily designed means whereby the thalamus, the brain's master clock, bound all sensory input and cortical responses into a coherent second-by-second gestalt of the universe. Even the big cricks hesitated to mess with such a core function.

"You're telling me that you've created an agent that will basically destroy a person's timebinding facility?"

"More or less. But all lifeforms are equal, and the prions will flourish without actually killing their hosts."

Sonny must have been reading my vital signs and detected my nervous concern, because he burst in like a mechanical octopus.

"Peej, what's to be done?"

"Wrap 'em."

Sonny's nozzles came alive, and within thirty seconds the Incubators were all enmeshed in sticky tangles. I called for a pickup and relayed what I had learned to Chief Priestly.

And that was the end of the easy part.

The entire complement of the UPCM, as well as hundreds of representatives from a dozen other bioregional and continental

agencies, were now on the track of the Kat. The next day, after receiving Chief Priestly's faint praise (and implied condemnation for not somehow suspecting the Incubators sooner), I, too, was back on the streets.

The night of my discovery, I had met Xuly Beth in Cockaigne for what felt like the last time. The candyland had never seemed shallower. Postsex, as we were silently resting, she said, "Be careful, won't you?"

"Sure. Don't I have Sonny to watch over me?"

She laughed. "Turing is spinning in his grave!" Growing serious, she asked, "You still carry a poqetpal, even after your upgrades, right?"

"Of course. It's always smart to have a backup connection to the metamedium."

Xuly Beth fingered her bumps. "Good, good… "

The Incubators had all been thoroughly interrogated without revealing any further clues about where Krazy Kat was hiding. Sonny and I explored a half dozen random possibilities without success. And all the time, something in the back of my mind was tickling my efferents.

Back at HQ, I took precious downtime to stare at the tornado-mandala.

And that's when it surfaced.

The odd scent in the tank.

I recognized it at last.

It was the scent of the Mats.

"Holy loas!" I said. "Sonny, come on!"