“Jed, listen, what are we talk-”

“That’s how you guys treat your friends? How do you treat your enemies? Maybe you give them-”

“Hey,” she said. “Jed. What are we talking about here? I mean, ultimately. Are we talking about the survival of the entire planet?”

I was about to say “But you guys caught the doomster.” But then I remembered that I didn’t believe that Madison was the doomster, and the fact that I didn’t believe a word of what I was saying would show up on the polygraph.

And “polygraph” is putting it mildly, I thought. Try polyinnumerabillomyriadomultinominalograph. There were teams of experts, both software and meatware, and not just here in this room, but in several different labs, all watching and interpreting every snack, crapple, and pock in every lobe and fissure of my brain. Hell, they could probably see video of me playing hipball against the Ocelots and having sex with Lady Koh and-well, okay, they can’t quite do that yet. But they can sure tell whether I’m lying, and a lot more besides.

“Jed?” Marena asked. “Is that what we’re talking about?”

Don’t answer, my other side said. That is, “my other side” as in “my regular interlocutor in my endless internal dialogue.” If you talk, you’ll say one thing too much. Just stay as schtum as possible and get the hell out of these ’trodes before you blurt something out. Right?

Right.

With great effort, I made contact with a few of my opiate-sodden muscles and rolled my head around. I could see that I was roughly in the center of a room the size of an average high-school classroom, and that besides Lisuarte, Marena, Taro, Michael Weiner, Ashleys sub-2 and sub-3, and Lance Boyle-all of whom, besides Taro, had, uh, doffed their masks-there were six other people working at portable workstations set around the walls. I thought I recognized a couple of them through their masks, students of Taro’s who’d worked on the Sacrifice Game software. Still, I hadn’t thought this many people were in on the specifics of the project. One, how’d they expect them all to keep it secret? And, two, hell’s bells, I’ve spilled my guts. This was not an intimate spot for a panic attack, a lover’s quarrel, or any other sort of freakout. And with my brain opened up for general viewing, it-basically I’d feel more private if I were having a gynecological exam in a sold-out operating theater. Fuckity fuckity fu “Because,” Marena went on, “because, if we’re talking about the survival of the entire planet, then, that kind of changes things, doesn’t it, that is, we’re kind of in wartime here, in fact, you, it’s, it’s more serious than just wartime, we’re at the tipping point of like life on earth, and a zillion innocent standbyers are all about to just-just, look, yes, of course we feel bad about Tony, but we’re grateful, I mean, look, he’s somebody we worked with, he’s a member of our unit who volunteered for a suicide mission, he, with, with conspicuous bravery, and, okay, he’s saving the day. It’s his decision. Okay?”

Again, I thought of saying something that sounded fairly good at first-this time it was “Oh, thanks, GI Jane, well, at least we’ve stopped pretending this isn’t a military operation”-and again, after about two seconds of thought, I said nothing. For one thing, at this stage I wasn’t sure that I wasn’t more worried that it might not be a military operation and might be just a commercial one, or rather maybe I was hoping that there was still an iota of difference.

“And the other-look, Jed 1 ’s still alive too,” Marena said. “That’s more than you expected, right?”

I sort of grunted.

“What would you have done? Think about it.”

“I don’t know what I would have done,” I said. “Anyway, that’s a meaningless-”

She started to interrupt me but I cut her off. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because,” she said, “because the psych evaluations indicated that it’d be better to hold off on any major shocks until you got your bearings, you-”

“Because you wanted me to go through any and all Sacrifice Game data first,” I said. “And then after that you can just toss me out on the street.”

“Nonsense,” Marena went. “Just relax a little. I’m not telling you not to think about the Sic thing, but you do need to relax or we’ll all be in worse trouble.”

I started to snap back at her and then didn’t. Chill, I thought. She’s right, you have to relax. She’s Hmm.

I wasn’t proud of it, but I was starting to suspect she might be right about a few other things. Like, was I really all that upset? Or did I just think I was upset because that would be the right way to feel? Sometimes one does the right thing just to make oneself feel like a decent person. You don’t want to admit to yourself that you’re a jerk. So you moan and complain but inside, not very deep down, there’s less upsetness there than you’d expect, or want people to know.

Maybe they’re right, I thought. They know I’ll get over it.

For one thing, I was alive again. It was an unexpected plus. And one feels grateful to whoever makes you alive. For another thing, I was already starting to think again about how I’d go about finding and neutralizing the real doomster. When you’re on a mission you forget about your own problems, or you accept it when other people solve them for you. Third, the team knew from my Lodestone letters that my stint in AD 664 hadn’t exactly been characterized by nonviolence. So maybe they figured I wouldn’t mind another sort-of death in my retinue.

And, fourth-well, I’d had enough experience with Better Self-Delusion Through Chemistry that even though I was in an unfamiliar body, I could tell they had me doped up within an inch of total all-flowering ever-abiding anupadisesa-nibbanadhatu nirvana. I could even tell that the main ingredients were levorphanol and diazapam. And when you have enough of that stuff on board-enough to get that feeling like you’re a rack of spring lamb that’s been soaking for ten hours in warm mint butter-somebody can come up to you and spit in your eye, steal your girlfriend, step on your blue suede shoes, and call you a Republican, and even if he’s unarmed and smaller than you are, you just kind of placidly stand there and laugh it off because, well, things just don’t seem all that dire. And of course right now they were raising the level of the stuff in my IV, so in a few minutes I’d be a useless glob of “And you’re in a younger body,” Marena said, “and, look, it’s a healthier and frankly a better-looking body.”

“He probably has leukemia,” I said.

“He doesn’t,” she said. “He’s, your body, it’s fine. You’re in perfect health.”

“Great.”

“Yeah.”

“Is that why?”

“Why what?”

“Why you’ve got me in Tony. You wanted me to stay healthier longer because I’m such a big investment? And I don’t have hemophilia. And you didn’t want to take the chance that, you know, if something went wrong on the uploading, then Jed-okay, uh, the original, Jed-Sub-One, he might be too damaged to be an effective player. Right? But you could still keep him on as a backup. Right?”

There was a smudge of hesitation. “There were other-”

“Or maybe there was a little character trouble. Right?”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“You didn’t like my PSD, the tsam lic addiction, obsessive-com… you thought Sic would be cleaner.”

Hesitation. Finally, Marena said, “Doctor?”

“Yes, there were some concerns,” Dr. Lisuarte’s voice said, farther behind me than before. “Some of Jed’s… I mean, you’re right, let’s call him Jed-Sub-One, uh… some of Jed-Sub-One’s reactions on the personality tests under the PET scan were, they weren’t-look, after a great deal of consideration we thought he might not be the best candidate for his own new…”

“Are you talking about the sociopathology scale?” I asked.

“Well, that’s… it’s one thing that won’t carry over,” she said. “Sic might have your memories but he wouldn’t have your personality. You might even feel that you do, but actually, you’ll be…”