“But you, Helen, and Stella really are a conspiracy, aren’t you?” Lisa pointed out. “How many others are involved? At first I thought eight or ten, but now I’m beginning to think forty or fifty.”

“You have to fight fire with fire,” Arachne West informed her solemnly. Beneath her slowly fading musculature, there seemed to be a twentieth-century thinker—but how could that be, when Arachne wouldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old when the century turned?

Maybe, Lisa thought, it’s the century itself that won’t die, having embedded its cliches far too deeply in the very fabric of social thought. On the other hand, perhaps the people who lived in twentieth-century England spent just as much time berating themselves and one another for a host of leftover Victorian attitudes that weren’t at all what they seemed to be.

“We’re wasting time,” she pointed out.

“I know,” the Real Woman replied. “Sometimes I think that’s all we’ve done for the last twenty years while everyone just waited for the war to break out. Now it has—and are we ready? Are we hell?”

Lisa knew that the “we” in question wasn’t just the two of them, or the Real Women, or the entire population of radfemdom, and it might even include a few males of the species.

“According to Leland, private enterprise is ready,” Lisa told her. “Whatever containment measures the commission finally recommends will be irrelevant. The lovely people who brought you the kind of fabrics you ‘could wear in a sewer and still come up as lush as a golden rose’ have their new season all planned out. Suits that protect you from the plague—in all its myriad forms—will be the next big thing. You don’t have to contain the evil germs if the people can contain themselves. You needn’t worry about hidden eugenic strategies, though. Private enterprise will sell to anyone, provided they have the money. And who doesn’t, when it’s your money or your life? There may yet be a little worm in the bud, unfortunately.”

“What worm?”

“I didn’t have time to get the whole story, but Chan’s already tested some kind of versatile antibody-packaging system in the only kind of context that really counts. It didn’t work. Maybe the suitskin system will screw up. You can never change just one thing, you see, and you can never tell how far the unanticipated consequences will extend.”

“Stella told us about the war work Miller was doing for Burdillon,” Arachne admitted. “She thought that was what had finally persuaded him to give up on the other thing.”

“Can I go in now?” Lisa asked. “I’d rather like to get it over with before the guys break down all the doors and start blazing away in every direction.”

“He really didn’t tell you anything at all, did he?” the Real Woman said wonderingly. “And you never thought to go digging, the way Stella did. You could have winkled it out forty years ago, if you’d only thought to look. Lisa the policeman, scourge of all the murderers and Leverers in Bristol, overlooks the crime of the century on her own doorstep! What a fool you must feel.”

“Okay,” Lisa conceded ungraciously. “I’m a fool. It’s way past time to repair my sins of omission. Do I get to see him now?”

“Be my guest,” the bald woman said tiredly. “You’d better change his dressing before you start, though. The anesthetic’s probably worn off and you won’t get much out of him while he’s all racked up. That was Helen’s idea—but if and when the time comes, I won’t be trying to duck responsibility on the grounds that I was just an innocent bystander.”

Arachne’s tone had changed. The last vestiges of graveyard humor had vanished. Her pale eyes were still locked on Lisa’s stare, but it wasn’t a competition. The Real Woman knew how badly this whole operation had screwed up, but she wasn’t looking for a way out. She was just seeing it through to its end.

Lisa accepted the medical kit and water bottle that Arachne hauled out from behind the desk, along with the smartcard that would complete the deactivation of the inner room’s locks, provided the code numbers had already been loaded.

“I hope it isn’t too painful,” the bald woman said. “Unlike the loose cannon, I never had anything against you.”

Lisa wasn’t certain whether Arachne was talking about the sight that would greet her when she passed through the door, or the truth that would finally be told once she got to interrogate Morgan Miller.

“I can take it,” she said, figuring that the reply would do in either case.

Arachne West swung her sturdy legs over the desk and slipped into a seat behind one of the screens. Lisa had no doubt that it was a position from which the Real Woman would be able to see and hear everything that transpired in the cell where Morgan Miller was confined. She didn’t mind. There had been far too many secrets for far too long. It was high time that everything was brought out in the open.

She passed the smartcard through the swipe slot, and the door obligingly clocked open. She went through it and closed it behind her.

It was as if she were closing the door on all sixty-one years of her carefully accumulated past.

TWENTY-ONE

The cell was gloomier by far than the anteroom. The bare brick had been carefully preserved here in all its brutal simplicity. The temperature seemed to have dropped by five degrees as Lisa crossed the threshold.

Morgan Miller was lying on a tubular-steel foldaway bed not unlike the one in which Leland had installed Stella Filisetti. He wasn’t secured to the frame by smart cords, but that was because he wasn’t in any condition to do anything as stupid as attacking his captors. The sleeve of the unsmart shirt he was wearing had been ripped from shoulder to cuff to expose his right arm, which was folded very carefully across his chest, exposing a long series of burns that looked as if they had been etched by a blowtorch. Some kind of dressing had been applied to the wounds, but the synthetic flesh hadn’t been able to bond properly. It had mopped up blood and other fluids that had leaked from the wounds, but its capacity to metabolize them had been overloaded. Even its painkilling capabilities had been overstretched.

When he first caught sight of Lisa, a hopeful gleam came into Morgan’s eyes, but it dwindled almost immediately to a mere ember of endurance. Even the benign mental chemistry of hope could be converted by injury into a source of pain.

Lisa knelt beside the bed and opened the medical kit. She drew off the useless pseudoskin as carefully as she could—not quite carefully enough, to judge by Morgan’s ragged breathing—and substituted a generous helping of gel. Only then was Morgan able to open his eyes again. He seemed to have been utterly drained of all physical resources—a considerable indignity for a man who had fondly imagined that he was as fit as a flea. It was an effort for him to raise his head and take a few sips from the plastic bottle.

“Shit, Morgan,” Lisa murmured. “Why didn’t you just tell them what they wanted to know?”

“What kind of fool do you take me for?” he whispered as he let his head sink back again. “I told them everythingbefore they even turned the flame in my direction. I told them the absolute truth—but they wouldn’t believe me. I found out a couple of hours too late that the only way to deal with torture is to tell the fuckers what they want to hear, not what they want to know.”

“Shit,” said Lisa again. She had never felt so helpless.

“I toldthem you didn’t have anything to do with it,” Miller said, urgency raising his voice. “They weren’t in a mood to take my word for anything. If I’d said that two plus two was four, they’d have got out their calculators.”

“It’s okay, Morgan,” Lisa said. “I’m here of my own free will. I came as soon as I figured out which of my old friends and acquaintances were involved. The cavalry won’t be far behind. The farce is almost over. Arachne’s people were panicked into precipitate action, but they’ve calmed down now. We’ll be okay.”