“We have nothing to hide,” said Rachel Trehaine as she came to her feet, “but that doesn’t mean that we don’t appreciate your discretion, Mr. Hart. Privacy is a very precious commodity in today’s world, and we value it as much as anyone.”

Damon took that to mean that she would definitely prefer it if he exercised the utmost discretion in passing on any further information, but that she wasn’t about to feed anyone’s paranoid suspicions by saying so explicitly.

As soon as he got back to his car Damon checked into the net-board where Operator 101 had posted the notice Yamanaka had showed him, but there was nothing new. There were no messages from Madoc Tamlin or Eveline Hywood awaiting his attention. Having decided that everything else could wait, Damon sent the car forth into the traffic.

He had no doubt that his movements were being monitored by Interpol, and that the fact of his visit to Ahasuerus, if not its content, would be known to Yamanaka. His eastward expedition would also have been observed and noted, but Tamlin could be trusted to evade any surveillance to which he was subject as and when he wished.

While the car made its silent way along the city streets, observing the speed limit with mechanical precision, Damon took out the folded note yet again and scanned the tantalizing lines for the hundredth time. He had expected no more from Ahasuerus than he had got and he had no doubt that he would have got no more from Rachel Trehaine no matter what tack he had adopted in making conversation, but he couldn’t help wondering whether he had concentrated on the wrong part of the puzzle. The most remarkable allegation it made was not that Eveline Hywood and the Ahasuerus Foundation knew something significantly shady about Conrad Helier’s past but that Conrad Helier was still alive. How could that be, when so much solid evidence remained of his death?

Damon wondered whether the kind of reconstructive somatic engineering that had been used to make Rachel Trehaine look younger than she was could be used to alter a man’s appearance out of all recognition. And if some more extravagant version of it didexist, if only as an experimental prototype, might it be applied to other applications? Specifically, might it transform the cells of one body in such a way that genetic analysis would conclude that they belonged to an entirely different person? In sum, how easy was it, in this day and age, for a man to fake his own death, even to the extent of providing a misidentifiable corpse? And if it were possible today, what was the likelihood that it had been equally possible fifty years ago?

“Paranoid fantasies,” Damon muttered as the stream of unanswerable questions dwindled away. He knew well enough that even if the matters of practicality were not insuperable the question of motive still remained—not to mention the matter of principlethat he had quoted to Madoc Tamlin.

The car came gently to a standstill and Damon realized that the traffic stream in both directions had ground to a halt. A quick look around told him that every emergency light in sight was on red and he groaned. Some idiot saboteur had hacked into the control system and thrown a software spanner into the works. He sighed and tried hard to relax. Usually, such glitches only took a few minutes to clear—but one of the reasons they had become so common of late was that rival parties of smart and prideful kids were trying just as hard to set new records as the city was.

By the time the car got moving again, Damon was not finding it at all difficult—in spite of his own checkered history—to sympathize with the hypothetical proposition he had put to Rachel Trehaine. Anyone who did come up with an authentic emortality serum might well be tempted to reserve it for the socially conscientious, while allowing all the lonely and resentful individuals who had nothing better to do with their time than fuck things up to fade into oblivion.

Seven

I

’m sorry we couldn’t bring flowers,” Madoc Tamlin said to Lenny Garon, “but they reckon flowers compromise the sterile regime and promote nosocomial infections. It’s bullshit, but what can you do?”

Lenny Garon made the effort to produce a polite smile. Madoc couldn’t help contrasting the boy’s stubbornly heroic attitude with that of Diana Caisson, who hadn’t smiled all day and didn’t seem likely to start now. He wouldn’t have brought her along if he’d had any choice, but even though the hospital was nearly the last place in the world she wanted to be she’d insisted on tagging along. It seemed that what proverbial wisdom said about misery loving company was true—and when Diana was miserable, she certainly had enough to go around.

“I shouldn’t be here,” the novice streetfighter said, as if the hospital’s insistence on keeping him in were a slur on his manhood. “The intestine’s not leaking anymore and the nanotech’s taking care of the peritonitis. I was just unlucky that the cut reached my spleen—it was nothing, really. They’ll probably let me out in a couple of hours if I kick up a fuss.”

“It wouldhave been nothing if you’d had IT as good as Brady’s,” Madoc told him cynically. “Pretty soon, you will. You have talent. It’s raw, but it’s real. Just a couple more fights and you’ll be ready to turn the tables. You hurt Brady too, you know—he might not be in the next bed, but he knows he was in a fight. One day, you’ll go even further than he has—if you stick at it.”

“Did you give the tapes to Damon Hart?”

Madoc couldn’t help glancing at Diana to see what effect the mention of Damon’s name had, and was unfortunate enough to catch her eye.

“Why should he give the tapes to Damon Hart?” she snapped at the boy, without taking her accusative eyes off Madoc.

“I thought that’s why he came to the fight,” Garon retorted innocently.

Madoc had a stoical expression all ready for display. He hadn’t had a chance to warn the boy to be discreet, and it was inevitable that the cat would be let out of the bag. Now it was his turn to be stubbornly heroic in the face of adversity. He waited for the storm to break.

“You didn’t tell me Damon was there,” Diana said, far less frostily than Madoc had anticipated. “What did he want?”

Madoc realized that her anger had been deflected by a false assumption. She assumed that Damon had sought out Madoc in order to talk about her. She must be hopeful that he had been consumed by regret and wanted Madoc to act as an intermediary in arranging a reconciliation. Madoc had already divined from the rambling odysseys of complaint he’d been forced to endure that what she wanted above all else was for Damon to “see sense” and realize that life without her was hardly worth living. Unfortunately, Madoc’s opinion was that Damon had been perfectly sensible in realizing that life without her wasworth living. He considered lying about Damon’s real purpose in visiting the fight scene, but figured that the web of deceit would probably grow so fast that it would end up strangling him. “He didn’t actually come over to watch the fight, Lenny,” he said, judiciously addressing the boy rather than Diana. “He doesn’t do a lot of that kind of work anymore. He’s busy with other things—customized VEs, mostly. You know the kind of thing—for phones, games, cable shows. . . .”

“Pornotapes,” Diana cut in acidly.

“Yeah . . . well, it was just business.”

“What kind of business?” Diana wanted to know. Now her resentment was building, as much because Madoc was avoiding her eye as because the news wasn’t what she wanted to hear. Madoc could see that the boy was curious too, but Diana’s curiosity was much sharper and it wasn’t going to be easy to fob her off. He felt obliged to try, though, if only for form’s sake.