“Oh shit,” he said. He had seen dead bodies before—he had even seen burned bodies before—but he had never seen human remains as badly charred as these. A little of the ash that had once been flesh had dusted onto the floor, as if the pitch-dipped skeleton had shed an eerie shadow. On the corpse’s tarry breast, however, was something innocent of any fire damage: a VE pak, placed atop the dead man’s heart. If it had been resting on a tabletop, Madoc would have whisked it away into an inside pocket without a moment’s delay, but he hesitated to take it from where it had been so carefully set. It looked uncomfortably like bait in a trap.

“Do you think that’s Silas Arnett?” Diana asked. Her voice fractured as she spoke the words, so that the whisper became louder than she had intended.

“I hope not,” Madoc said—but he had no idea who to hope it might be instead. He might have hoped that it was an ancient corpse which had lain undiscovered for years, but his nose would have told him otherwise even if the floor on which it lay and the object set upon it had not been products of contemporary technology.

They were both still hovering in the doorless entrance, uncertain as to whether they dared to approach and crouch down to examine the body, when the door at the far end of the corridor opened with a considerable crash. Madoc instantly stepped back, using the flashlight to see what was happening.

Two men had come through the door: men with guns in their hands.

By the time he heard their warnings and recognized the weapons they were holding out before them, Madoc’s panic had already been leavened by a certain relief. It could have been worse. It couldhave been the people who had killed the poor bastard stretched out on the floor and torched his corpse. Compared with men capable of such an act as that, the police could only seem gentle. Madoc had been under arrest a dozen times before, and had survived every time.

Obediently, he dropped the flashlight on the floor of the corridor, and the tool kit too. He even raised his hands before stepping back into the room from which he’d just emerged.

“Well,” he muttered to Diana, who was trying to see over his shoulder, “you wanted in, and you’re in. I only hope you can talk your way out again.”

The two cops moved confidently forward to complete the arrest. As soon as they had relaxed, Madoc grabbed Diana, maneuvered her through the empty doorway, and shoved her with all the force he could muster along the corridor toward the on-coming cops. She had raised her own arms, and her hands grappled for purchase as she cannoned into the two men and tried to stop herself falling.

While the cops tried to catch her, and to save themselves from being bowled over, Madoc plucked the VE pak off the chest of the blackened corpse with his left hand while the right groped for the crowbar. Once he had both items securely within his grip he moved forward with a ruthless determination befitting the trainer and master of the best streetfighters in the city.

As he had told Diana, gentler methods were sometimes second best to simple brute force. He hoped that this would prove to be one of those times.

Fifteen

D

uring the hours when the last vestiges of his internal technology had tried their damnedest to maintain some semblance of function Silas Arnett had felt like a turtle floating beneath the surface of a stagnant pond. It was as if his self-consciousness had been immersed in murky, cloying depths which lay upon him like a horrid dead weight, compacting his bodily mass.

In the meantime, his weary and leaden eyes had looked out into a very different world: a world that was all light and color and action where there seemed to be no weight at all.

Now, he felt that he was the same turtle rudely stripped of its shell. His frontier with the outer world was exposed to all manner of assaults and horribly sensitive. He could hardly believe that thousands of generations of human beings had lived their entire lives becalmed in flesh as awkward and as vulnerable as this. The novelty of the experience had already worn off—and the process of psychological readaptation was neither as radical nor as difficult as he had feared—but the sensitivity remained.

No matter how still Silas sat, simple existence had become a torrent of discomforts. The straps at his wrists and ankles chafed his skin, but that was not the worst of it. The worst of it was that he could not scratch his itches, although the fact that he could not alter his position save by imperceptible shifts of weight and strain was almost as bad.

It was torture of a kind, but the wonder of it was that it was not realtorture. No pincers had been applied to his nipples, no electric shocks to his genitals, no hot irons to his belly, no slivers of bamboo to his fingernails. It was as if he had been prepared for the operating theater only to discover that the surgeon had been called away . . . and had left no word as to the likely time of his return. He had been thoroughly insulted, in body and in mind, but no dire injury had as yet been added to the insult.

What made this all the more puzzling was the tape he had been shown of his “trial,” whose maker had taken the trouble to include one very audible—and rather realistic—scream, and had made some effort to imply that others had been edited out of the package.

The trial scene was gone now, and Silas was in a very different virtual environment—one which mimicked the texture of visual reality reasonably faithfully. The room in which his prison chair now seemed to be standing was also mostly white. It had white walls and a cream carpet, and its ceiling was uniformly lit by a gentle artificial bioluminescence which had very little color in it.

Silas knew that the universe of virtual reality was overabundantly well-equipped with white rooms. Far too many of the people who specialized in VE design cultivated a thorough understanding of the hardware and software they were using while neglecting the development of their own creative imagination and aesthetic sensitivity. It was becoming routine for software engineers and “interior decorators” to form up into “renaissance teams,” although youngsters like Damon Hart always figured that they could do everything themselves. Silas did not assume, however, that this particular white room was a convenient fiction. Life always imitated art, and he could easily believe that the place of his confinement had been decorated in imitation of an elementary VE.

The man who stood before Silas in the white room was not a judge. He was wearing Conrad Helier’s face, but any halfway competent VE engineer could have contrived that—there was a vast reservoir of archive film which could be plundered for the purpose of making a template. “Conrad” was wearing a white lab coat, but that seemed blatantly incongruous to Silas. Conrad had never been a man for white coats.

“I don’t understand,” Silas said. “The trial tape even lookslike a fake. You didn’t need me at all. You could have put that farce together without any of the snippets of actual speech that you borrowed. If you already knew what you were going to put in my so-called confession, why did you bother throwing all those questions at me?”

He knew, even as he made this speech, that it was ridiculously optimistic to suppose that the fact that he had not been hurt yetmeant that he was not going to be hurt at all, but he was telling the simple truth when he said that he didn’t understand.