So far as I could judge, the fact that Adam Zimmerman was being awakened hereand nowhad to imply that the people who were actually doing the work had something to gain. In other words, Davida Berenike Columella and her weird sisterhood — or the people giving them instructions — must want something, and must think that Adam Zimmerman could help them get it. If Christine Caine and I had notbeen chosen by lot, they must think that we could help them get it too. They must think that we had some special value — or, at the very least, some special significance.

Irritatingly, it was easier to imagine a reason why Christine Caine might be valuable than it was to figure out what special significance I might have.

Christine Caine had killed people, without having anything that could pass for a reasonable motive. If she had been fitted with some kind of fancy IT that could prevent her from doing any such thing again, that same IT was probably able to facilitate her doing it, and perhaps to force her to do it. Christine Caine might, in fact, be a useful assassination weapon, in a day and age when assassination weapons were rare.

I had to remember, though, that no one seemed to know for certain whether the two million people who had been killed by the Yellowstone supervolcano were the victims of an accidental malfunction or deliberate sabotage. With assassination weapons like that around, the only advantage a human assassin could offer was precision.

If Christine Caine were an assassination weapon, I reasoned, then I might be one too — in which case, I thought, I might have been selected precisely because I didn’t have a record of unmotivated violence. Perhaps, if that were the case, Christine Caine was only the decoy, to distract attention away from the real threat.

On the other hand…

It was too complicated. I needed more hard data.

What Excelsior’s datastores could tell me about Michael Lowenthal was limited, but they did reveal that he had been born in 2464. As Davida Berenike Columella had already told me, having drawn the information from the same source, Damon Hart hadn’t died until 2502 — which meant that if Lowenthal had been affiliated to the Inner Circle in his youth, in however humble a capacity, he might have known Damon.

One item of Lowenthal’s background peculiar enough to attract attention from the compiler of the datastore was that although he was not a policeman he had been involved — as an “observer” — in the investigation of a case of serial murder that had occurred in 2495. It wasn’t the last on record, but it had been verybig news at the time, and it had been a case whose craziness was at least the equal of Christine Caine’s. I wondered whether that might be a reason why Michael Lowenthal might have a particular interest in Christine Caine.

I didn’t want to give the people monitoring my actions too much insight into my suspicions, but I figured that it was probably safe to look into the history of SusAn penology, with particular reference to the possible survival of other “prisoners” of my own era.

At the time of my own incarceration SusAn had been used throughout the world as a repository for criminals of all kinds. It had been widely advertised as “protection without punishment” for half a century: a humane alternative to traditional practices, one wholly befitting the philosophy of the supposed New Utopia. Much had been said and written about “future rehabilitation”: the idea that the increased efficiency of future technologies would more than compensate for the fact that any resources and skills possessed by individuals confined in SusAn would become obsolete. Not only would future IT be able to “treat” or “cure” antisocial tendencies at root, turning psychopaths and recidivists into model citizens, but improved educational systems would allow the remodeled citizens in question to be retrained for whatever useful work might be available.

Everybody with half a brain knew, of course, that it was all bullshit — but it was politically useful bullshit. It provided an ideological basis for getting rid of anyone who proved to be too much of a pest. People who committed minor offenses were put away for a few months or a few years, as a warning to them and to others — and people who couldn’t take the hint were put away indefinitely. Present society washed its hands of them, swept them under the carpet and left the dirt to be tidied up by future generations. Was anyone ever surprised that the future generations never quite got around to it, preferring to discover all kinds of good reasons for continuing to pass the buck? I suspect not.

If the corpsicles had continued to pile up, of course, the situation might have become absurd, and eventually intolerable, but they hadn’t. Unlike all previous penal systems, SusAn incarceration had appeared to be effective, in the crude statistical sense that crime rates began to drop — quite sharply — as the twenty-third century progressed. The drop had been represented by enthusiasts as proof that thisdeterrent actually worked. It was, of course, no such thing. The real reasons for the steady fall in crime rates, my sources assured me, were the gradual but inexorable removal of incentives to commit crime and the gradual but inexorable increase in the certainty of detection.

I had lived in an era where many people were routinely subject to the vagaries of rage and intoxication, and in which the electronic stores where credit was held were still vulnerable to clever tampering. It was also an era in which a great many people — especially the young — took a perverse delight in cheating the surveillance systems that had been set up to make crime difficult, regarding all such measures as a challenge to their ingenuity. In my day, hobbyist criminals were everywhere. Although everyone affected to deplore and despise those whose hobbyism extended to raw violence, especially when it involved murder, there was a widespread fascination with violence. That fascination supported a rich and varied pornography as well as a highly developed risk culture. People newly gifted with IT — especially when the effectiveness of a person’s IT was the most effective badge of wealth and status — were inevitably tempted to test its limitations in all kinds of extreme sports, many of them illegal. According to Excelsior’s data banks, however, all that stuff had faded away as the novelty wore off.

As the cost of IT had come down, attitudes had shifted dramatically; the fascination of violence, pain, and death had never disappeared, but it had become the prerogative of exotic cults whose breakthroughs to the cultural mainstream became increasingly rare. As polite exercise of the self-control that better IT permitted became routine, rage and intoxication dwindled toward extinction. As credit-tracking systems were further refined, successful thefts and frauds became so rare that no rational risk calculation could support them. Even the young ceased to see the erosion of privacy and secrecy as a challenge, and adapted themselves to living in a world where no sin was likely to remain long undetected — or, for that matter, long unforgiven.

By 2300, the use of SusAn as a mode of incarceration had come to seem unnecessary and ridiculously old-fashioned. By 2400, the spectrum of social misdemeanours had altered dramatically throughout the world, and those which persisted were more commonly addressed by mediated reparation and “house arrest.” By that time, SusAn incarceration was only used outside the Earth — and even there, its use declined in spite of the dramatic increase in the extraterrestrial population. The once-rich flow of individuals committed to SusAn because their neighbors wanted them out of the way had fallen to a mere trickle by the time of the Coral Sea Disaster of 2542, and the vast majority of those were rejects from the burgeoning societies of the moon and the microworlds.