One of the intruders bent to pick up the fallen gun, and he began firing even as he plucked it from the floor. Silas felt a trio of needles spear into the muscles of his breast, not far beneath the shoulder. There was no pain at all now, but he knew that whatever poison the darts bore must have been designed to resist the best efforts of his internal technology. These people had come equipped to fight, and their equipment was the best. He knew that their motives must be similarly sophisticated and correspondingly sinister.

It was not until the missiles had struck him and burrowed into his efficiently armored but still-frail flesh, that Silas Arnett called to mind the deadliest and most fearful word in his vocabulary: Eliminators!Even as the word sprang to mind, though—while he still lashed out impotently against the three men who no longer had to struggle to subdue him—he could not accept its implications.

I have not been named!he cried silently. They have no reason!But whoever had come to his house, so cleverly evading its defenses, clearly had motive enough, whether they had reason enough or not.

While his internal defenses struggled unsuccessfully to cope with the drug which robbed him of consciousness, Silas could not evade the dreadful fear that death—savage, capricious, reasonless death—had found him before he was ready to be found.

Two

D

amon Hart had never found it easy to get three boxes of groceries from the trunk of his car to his thirteenth-floor apartment. It was a logistical problem with no simple solution, given that his parking slot and his apartment door were both so far away from the elevator. Some day, he supposed, he would have to invest in a collapsible electric cart which would follow him around like a faithful dog. For the moment, though, such a purchase still seemed like another step in the long march to conformism—perhaps the one which would finally seal his fate and put an end to the last vestiges of his reputation as a rebel. How could a man who owned a robot shopping trolley possibly claim to be anything other than a solid citizen of the New Utopia?

In the absence of such aid Damon had no alternative but to jam the elevator door open while he transferred the boxes one by one from the trunk of the car. By the time he got the third one in, the elevator was reciting its standard lecture on building policy and civic duty. While the elevator climbed up to his floor he was obliged to listen to an exhaustive account of his domestic misdemeanors, even though he hadn’t yet clocked up the requisite number of demerits to be summoned before the leasing council for a token reprimand. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to ride all the way on his own; two middle-aged women with plastic faces and brightly colored suitskins got in at the third and traveled up to the tenth, doubtless visiting another of their ubiquitous kind. They pretended to ignore the elevator, but Damon knew that they were drinking in every word. He had never been introduced to either one of them and had no idea what their names might be, but they probably knew everything there was to know about him except his real name. He was the building’s only ex-streetfighter; in spite of their youth—and partly because of it—he and Diana had more realmisdemeanors credited to their law accounts than all the remaining inhabitants of their floor.

He managed to get all three boxes out of the elevator without actually jamming the door, but he had to leave two behind while he carried the third to the door of his apartment. He set it down, ringing his own doorbell as he turned away to fetch the second. When he came back with the second box, however, he found that his ring had gone unanswered. The first box was still outside. Given the number of spy eyes set discreetly into the corridor walls there was no way anyone would take the risk of stealing any of its contents, but its continued presence was an annoyance nevertheless. When Damon had placed the second box beside the first he fished out his key and opened the door himself, poking his head inside with the intention of calling for assistance.

He closed his mouth abruptly when the blade of a carving knife slammed into the doorjamb, not ten centimeters away from his ducking head. The blade stuck there, quivering.

“You bastard!” Diana said, rushing forward to meet him from the direction of his edit suite.

It didn’t take much imagination to figure out what had offended her so deeply. The reason she hadn’t answered the doorbell was that she’d been too deeply engrossed in VE—in the VE that he’d been in the process of redesigning when concentration overload had started his head aching. Damon realized belatedly that he ought to have tidied the work away properly, concealing it behind some gnomic password.

“It’s not a final cut,” he told her, raising his arms with the palms flat in a placatory gesture. “It’s just a first draft. It won’t be you in the finished product—it won’t be anything likeyou.”

“That’s bullshit,” Diana retorted, her voice still taut with pent-up anger. “First draft, final cut—I don’t give a damn about that. It’s the principle of the thing. It’s sick, Damon.”

Damon knew that it might add further fuel to her wrath, but he deliberately turned his back on her and went back into the corridor. He hesitated over the possibility of picking up one of the boxes of groceries he’d already brought to the threshold, but he figured that he needed time to think. He walked all the way back to the elevator, taking his time.

This is it, he thought, as he picked up the third box. This is really it. If she hasn’t had enough, I have.

He couldn’t help but feel that in an ideal world—or even the so-called New Utopia which was currently filling the breach—there ought to be a more civilized way of breaking up, but his relationship with Diana Caisson had always been a combative affair. It had been his combativeness that first attracted her attention, in the days when hehad wielded the knives—but he had only done so in the cause of sport, never at the behest of mere rage.

A great deal had changed since then. He had switched sides; instead of supplying the raw material to be cut, spliced, and subtly augmented into a salable VE product, he was now an engineer and an artist. She had changed too, but the shift in her expectations hadn’t matched the shift in his. With every month that passed she seemed to want more and more from him, whereas he had found himself wanting less and less from her. She had taken that as an insult, as perhaps it was.

Diana thought that the time he spent building and massaging VEs was a retreat from the world, and from her, which ought to be discouraged for the sake of his sanity. She couldn’t see how anyone could absorbthemselves in the painstaking creation of telephone answering tapes and pornypops—and because every stress and strain of their relationship had always become manifest in her explosive anger, she had developed a profound hatred even for the more innocuous products of his labor.

In the beginning, Diana’s habit of lashing out had added a certain excitement to their passion, but Damon had now reached a stage when the storm and the stress were nothing but a burden—a burden he could do without. He had given up streetfighting; he was an artistnow, through and through. He had hoped that Diana would share and assist his adaptation to a new lifestyle and a new philosophy—and he had to give her some credit for trying—but the fact remained that their move into polite society had never really come close to working out. Diana even got steamed up when the elevator took leave to remind her of the small print in the building rules.