I didn't tell anyone where I was going, in case it turned out to be a wild virus chase.

And as Doctor Varela would later show me, maybe I unconsciously wanted a one on-one confrontation with the creature who had caused me so much frustration.

The UPCM kept a boathouse on the harbor. I signed out a swath-small waterplane area twin hull-and was soon zipping out to se a a t a good speed.

"We checked out the Mats when our assignment was first given," protested Sonny, wearing a Hughes chassis today that resembled a multilegged Hallucinagenia out of the Burgess Shale.

"I know. But that's not to say that Krazy Kat wasn't elsewhere then, and on the Mats now."

"Possibly. I wish I had been able to confirm your hunch as to the origin of that smell."

"There was no time. Do you want to risk having those prions loosed on the human populace?"

"Then kibes would rule Boston."

I stared at the robot, but on this model there was no expression to interpret.

"A joke. Of the type that partners make to each other."

"Oh. Ha– ha."

It took an hour to reach the Mats, out around the Georges Bank, but I could smell them before I could see them.

The vast collection of cyanobacteri a a nd diatoms carpeted several thousand square kilometers of sea, looking like a mushy ectoplasmic rug, floating meatloaf. Source of multipurpose biomass, home to a flourishing ecology of both basal and biofabbed useful and edible creatures, the Mats were cultivated for humanity by special-purpose, low-intelligence kibes.

One or more of which the Kat must have subverted and sent to do his bidding.

At the landward edge of the Mats, a small floating station anchored to the seafloor served the rare human visitors: an OTEC power plant, a beacon, an emergency habitat.

We docked. I wasn't attempting to be quiet, since there was nowhere for the Kat to go or hide.

''Watch the boat," I told Sonny.

"Until otherwise needed."

I climbed onboard the gently rocking deck of the lonely, midocean outpost.

In the north, I could see curious stormclouds massing in a previously clear sky. But I couldn't spare any thought or attention for the weather. My whole being was attuned to picking up the presence of the Kat. But so far, nothing.

That was why I was so surprised when, as I approached one side of the platform, his paw burst from the water and clamped around my ankle.

He yanked, I went down, but not in, as I grabbed onto a stanchion. Feeling resistance, the Kat exploded out of the water and onto the deck. He kicked, I rolled, found my feet, and confronted him in a fighter's crouch.

"Sonny!" I yelled.

"Coming, Pee-" said the kibe.

Then there was a splash.

Two harvesters had clambered aboard the swath and dumped Sonny overboard. My partner had gone to swim with the fishes. And he couldn't swim.

That left me and the Kat.

I suppose I should have been honored to be one of the few humans ever to directly confront the legendary splice. But instead I was scared into almost a Blankie-wearing state. After the way he had so easily brought me down, I had to run an emergency mantra just to stay cool.

Even dripping wet, fur plastered to his noble body, ears flattened to his skull, Krazy Kat looked every bit the Byronic antihero. There was something regal and wild about him and, I could see how his image had captivated so many to his doomed cause.

"Give it up, Kat, and I promise you won't get hurt," I bluffed.

His voice mixed purr and snarl, his whiskers twitched. "No, just imprisoned and reviled, made to kiss my inferior's boots!"

"Better to live than to die."

"Not on those terms!"

"Your call," I said, then held my palm out to him in a gesture like a traffic kibe's.

Antipersonnel spray-blistering, blinding, stifling-lanced out from my exocrine glands and caught the Kat in the face.

Roaring, he launched himself at me despite the pain. We hit the plates, and I felt his teeth in my neck, piercing my imbricated skin. My grip on his shoulders meant nothing to him.

I guessed I was about to find out how good neo-goretex veins were.

Things started to get black, and I thought my vision was going.

But it turned out to be the clouds above.

And as I looked in disbelief, all hell broke loose.

Lightning, thunder, rain in buckets, then the final punch: a microburst of wind similar to the kind that could and had leveled whole tracts of forest in pre GEF days.

The Kat and I were sluiced off the bucking station and into the sea. Beneath the waves, I finally managed to break his hold-or did he release me? In any case, I was free.

I fought my way to the surface There was no sigh of the Kat.

Instead there was a fleet of approaching swaths, into one of which I was soon unceremoniously hauled.

We searched for the Kat with eyes and instruments and remotes for several hours, but of that bad, bad splice there was no sign. He had gone to feed the hungry sea, or perhaps not. Though escape seemed impossible.

Before we left, we even managed to track clown Sonny and raise it from the ocean floor. The kibe had been heading back on the bottom under its own power and probably would have made it, if its brick hadn't run down.

The first call I took after getting patched up was from Chief Priestly, who dished out her usual mix of puffery and abuse.

The second one was from Xuly Beth.

"Isn't Global Positioning wonderful?" she said, joyfully teary-eyed.

"And aren't I lucky to have a friend in high places?"

"The stratosphere, to be precise," said Xuly Beth.

Peter Rabbit stubbed out his cigarette on the rock upon which he sat, sent the dead butt spinning with a flick of a stubby claw, and sighed.

It was night. The fragrant country air around him carried cleanly the noises of noncultivar life, poignant cries, lonely calls, sly rustlings.

Frogs, but no Jeremy Fisher.

Owls, but no Mr. Brown.

Badgers, but no Tommy Brock.

Hedgehogs, but no Mrs. Tiggywinkle.

These, his fellow splices, were penned, not free to roam as was he.

Peter reached up to the tip of one long ear, the left. That ear had been illegally docked two years ago, shortly after Peter's escape from the Garden. This had been the only way to remove the silicrobe owner-tattoon, the Warne licensing mark, which had been injected at the Schering-Plough biofab facility, on behalf of McGregor's gembaitch,

before Peter was shipped. Afterwards, the ear had been regenerated. But the new part had always felt foreign. Peter had a tendency to finger it when he was nervous, as he was now.

His perch was high on a hill in the Lake District, near the village of Sawrey, in the western bioregion of the European Community. Below, the village was lit by the delicate glow of low-photonic reradiants. To the south Peter could see the grounds of the Beatrix Potter epcot, otherwise known as the Garden.

How long ago his life there seemed… He had spent only thirteen months in the Garden, but it had felt like forever. The silly skits, the gawping EC, NU, and CoPro tourists, the tasteless food-Through kinky proteins or rebel peptides, he had found himself totally unfit for his servitude.

The two years-a fifth of his warrantied lifespan-since his flight into the arms of the CLF had been packed with activity. On death's very doormat from lack of diet-supplements, he had stumbled upon the London nucleus of the CLF just in time. After the docking and the standard course of trope-training and soma toning, he had been ready to play his part in transgenic liberation.