Jinx spoke with the voice of reason, and I knew what he advocated was the only sensible course. Still, my whole soul rebelled at the notion of going on with our boring lives without doing something, especially when we'd have to face all our cohort tomorrow.

I stood up. "I guess the only thing left to do then is to get spiked. At least it'll show our poohs we've got wills of our own. And it should shut Honeysuckle right up. Are you in a dedicated mode?"

Jinx boosted himself off the bench, thumping onto the grass. "Does a carebear sit in the pedwards?"

I laughed. "G-Gnome, here we come!"

Slidewalk Seven was only a one-block stroll north of us, so we chose that transport over the Arteries.

If you pulled out a length of your intestines and slit it longwise, you'd expose the velvety microvilli lining, the zillions of little fingers that propel food through your gut. You'd also have a pretty good model of a slidewalk.

The sturdy silicrobe microvilli of the slidewalk propelled anything placed atop them along at a steady 5kph. (You could ride the network cross-continent in just a month, if you wanted to spend your vacation that boring way, like many slouch oldsters did.) Each invisible finger was rooted in place, yet flexible enough to pass on its burden to its neigh-

bor. (In constant motion, the slidewalks conveyed a visual impression similar to the waveriness of heated syalon pavement. And if you rode them barefoot, they tickled almost subliminally.) Different lanes had different built-in directional orientations, for two-way travel.

The Amgen motto-"Taxis, not taxis"-was spelled out right in the substance of the slidewalks. I remembered having to have my dads explain it to me when I was little, since I never knew that "tax-us" could also be pronounced ''tax-ease," or even what they were.

Jinx swung himself deftly onboard with the other passengers, vars, kibes, and citizens, and I had to stutter-skip to stay with him. I wasn't usually so awkward, but guess I was kind of nervous about our plans, even though I thought I had convinced myself it was the only way.

As if sensing my unease, Jinx tried to make me laugh. "Did you ever download any reductionist paradigm fiction where the author tried to imagine a system like this and came up with miles of rubber belts on rollers?"

Jinx's trick worked, and I laughed like a hyena splice. "That's not true. You're yanking my rods."

Jinx held up one hand. "Parity-plus, Arnie. I'll give you the urals, and you can see for yourself."

I chuckled some more. Those ancients-where were their heads at?!

Before too long, we were dismounting at Bughouse Square.

The thronging Square always reminded me of an old-time carnival midway you might see on some historical chan-

nel of the metamedium: lines of garish booths and arcades, peopled by touts and vendors under gaudy silicrobe signage. The centerpiece of the Square, the original Chiron Bughouse, looked positively postmodern, next to the more recent exotic additions to the meatmart.

Here you could find a chromosartor or genebender or simple trope doser who would perform any possible alteration on your somatype or genotype-for a price. If you had the eft, you could be snipped, ripped or zipped; pumped, stumped or trumped; strobed, lobed or probed; primped, skimped or pimped; vented, scented or demented.

I stood for a minute or so bathing in the scary, alluring, surreal circus, until Jinx tugged at the hem of my doublet.

"Let's find number ten-forty, before we change our minds."

Tracking round the Square, past the TATA Box and the Primordium, past the Organelle Store and Radio Shack Biocircuits outlet, we soon came to the G Gnome's Cave.

Its facade was all fractal-modeled grocrete stalactites and stalagmites framing an irregular entrance curtained by enviromental ribbons.

I looked at Jinx, and he looked at me. Taking his hand, I tried to be as brave as my truncated spaceling.

"Let's get spiked," I said.

And we went through the ribbons.

My dads told me that a decade or two ago there was a rage for somatypes modeled on the characters in some old reedpair fantasy novel, sparked by a new virtuality rendering of the work. So for a while all you saw on the streets were

bobbits and snorks and smogs, or creatures with some such names.

I figured the G-Gnome must have modeled himself on a troll or dwarf or some other runt from that book. His big blue eyes, capped by furry brows, were nearly on a level with Jinx's, and the G-Gnome was standing on his bandy legs! Two tufts of snowy fiuffaduff sprang from behind his ears and decorated his otherwise bare skull. He wore a leather bib apron over a Windskin suit, and his hands were more massive than Jinx's.

To have maintained the same outdated look all these years made me think he was a conservative, slowmole kind of guy, and I instantly felt better to be putting myself in his brawny hands, so reassuringly similar to my proxy's.

"Children," the G-Gnome rumbled, "how can I help you?"

"We're here-" I began, then stopped.

A thrid– vid display had come on at our arrival, and now, cycling through a display of the G-Gnome's wetwares, it had reached the boobs.

They were so beautiful. Conical or melony, brown or creamy, drip-nippled or virgin-tipped, they were like taunting mirages in my personal desert.

It was all I could do to turn back to the G-Gnome and beg, "Please, shut that off." With my luck, the next thing shown would be a variety of the cocks Jinx lacked.

The proprietor complied, and I could breathe.

"Thank you. We're here to get spikes."

The G– Gnome's professional smile never wavered, but I could sense something tightening inside him.

"You have your parents'-"

"We've got this," I said, and offered Honeysuckle's card.

Taking it, the G-Gnome flexed it back and forth with a noncommittal expression, but I could see nudollar signs in his eyes.

"Peej Rancifer lent you her card without, ah, duress?… "

I tried a haughty sniff like Honeysuckle used. "Of course. We're the best of friends."

"There should be no problem then."

"I hope not," I said, as the G-Gnome's words made my knees go watery.

"Please, be seated."

When Jinx and I were side by side, the G-Gnome activated the display again. But this time it ran through the various models of spike.

By the second rep, we had made up our minds.

"I'll take the Staghorns," said Jinx.

"And I'll take the Coral Cage."

"Very fine choices, both. The placement of each differs slightly. The Staghorns are implanted in the frontal region, whereas the Cage tends more toward the temporals."

The G– Gnome had donned gloves while he was talking and now squeezed from a tube a line of paste. He approached Jinx and rubbed the goop into his skull, up front.

Then he did the same to me, more toward the middle of my head.

Carefully peeling off the gloves and dropping them into a D-Grade-All unit, the G-Gnome said, "A mix of topical anesthetic and bonemelt. It takes a few moments to work. I shall debit Peej Rancifer's card while we wait, if you have no objections."

When he was done with that, the G-Gnome went to a cabinet, from which he removed the spikes.

I had never seen the things except on the metamedium, where they were always filtershot real sexy, so I was unprepared for how innocuous they looked in real life: just a pair of square-ish, pointy, drab-well, spikes, like the kind you might find holding down reedpair railroad ties.

Next from the cabinet came a shiny chrome-handled, rubber-headed mallet.

And with this, the G-Gnome drove the spikes into our heads.

I couldn't feel anything, even when the spike penetrated my dura mater. That G Gnome was slouch-negative! He had that single tap down perfect. Naturally, I should have known that Honeysuckle and her family would patronize only the best.