“Thanks,” Damon said. “I will.”

As the door slid shut behind the boy Damon looked around the room, wondering why people still chose to live this way in a city full of empty spaces. While the greater part of Los Angeles slowly rotted down to dust—whole counties ripe for redevelopment by today’s more expert gantzers—it was preference rather than economic necessity which kept its poorer people huddled together in neighborhoods full of high-rise blocks, living in narrow rooms with fold-down beds, kitchens the size of cupboards, and even smaller bathrooms.

Perhaps, Damon thought, people had grown so completely accustomed to crowding during the years before the Crash that their long-lived children had had the habit ingrained in their mental pathways during infancy, and there simply weren’t enough children in Lenny Garon’s generation to start a mass migration to fresher fields. That kind of explanation seemed, at any rate, to make more sense than oft-parroted clichés about buildings needing services and the proximity principles of supply and transport.

“I suppose you heard what happened?” Madoc said miserably.

“Yamanaka gave me the brute facts,” Damon admitted. “I talked to Diana, but she had other things on her mind and it wouldn’t have been a good idea to tell me anything the cops didn’t already know. You found a VE pak—have you had a chance to play it through?”

“Sure. I took it all the way to the top—the Old Lady herself—so that we could play it through without anyone else looking in. It shows Silas Arnett being questioned by Surinder Nahal, giving answers very different from those he gave on the tape that was dumped on the Web. Do you want to see it? The Old Lady says it’s just another fake, probably cooked up for Interpol’s benefit.”

“It doesn’t show Nahal being killed?”

Madoc was infinitely more willing than Hiru Yamanaka to display his surprise. “No,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “Why would it?”

“That’s what Yamanaka’s expecting. They found Silas dead and a tape that shows him being shot—as if it were an execution.”

“Eliminators?” Madoc asked.

“That’s what it looks like,” Damon said with a sigh, “but we live in a very deceptive world. Unfortunately, the fact that it’s only one more fake cooked up for his benefit won’t make Yamanaka any less anxious to get his hands on the VE pak. Avoiding loss of face is just about the only thing left to him—he must know by now that the people behind this are out of reach. The police might think they’re maintaining the law of the land, just as the Washington Rump still thinks it’s in charge of making it, but the whole system is exhausted. When all appearances can be manufactured, the concept of evidenceloses its meaning.”

Madoc released the VE pak from where he’d loaded it into Lenny Garon’s console and passed it over to Damon. “Do you know who’s behind this?” he asked.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Damon admitted. “According to a dream I had when they snatched me away from Karol’s friends, it’s someone who claims to be speaking on behalf of the entire world order, but that might be megalomania or simple overstatement.”

Madoc was so enthusiastic to say what he had to say that he didn’t bother to query Damon’s reference to a dream. “The Old Lady says that it’s someone from PicoCon. Someone high up in the corp structure.” He met Damon’s eyes anxiously, looking for a reaction.

“That would make sense,” Damon conceded. “It has to be someone with access to cutting-edge technology, and PicoCon is the edge beyond the edge. I’m sorry I got you into this, Madoc—I thought at first that it was just a petty thing. Nobody expects to go after an Eliminator Operator and run into the full might of PicoCon.”

“The cops know that I didn’t kill the guy whose body we found, don’t they?” Madoc queried uneasily.

“Sure. Yamanaka knows that the corpse was torched several hours before you got there. His own surveillance team gave you a perfect alibi. If you say the cops spooked you—came in without a proper warning or whatever—you might excuse the blow with the crowbar as a reflexive response. The LAPD will want to pay off some of their grievances against you, but a decent lawyer ought to be able to persuade a judge to take a reasonable view of the matter.”

“Who did kill him, do you think?” Madoc asked cautiously. “PicoCon?”

“I’m not sure that anybody did. I suspect that the orchestrator of this little pantomime is trying to establish that in today’s world a body, an autopsy, and a DNA analysis don’t add up to proof that someone is actually dead. The people behind this are convinced that Conrad Helier’s alive, and they refuse to be told that he’s not.”

“Where did they get a body with Surinder Nahal’s DNA?” Madoc wanted to know.

“Tissue-culture tanks that turn out steaks the size of a building could turn a half a liter of blood into a skeleton with a few vital organs and a covering of skin, without even needing rejuve technology to stretch the Hayflick limit. If Karol’s body ever gets fished out of the Pacific, I suspect it’ll be just as thoroughly beaten up and just as fake. None of which would prove anything about my father, who died in bed of natural causes— hiscadaver would have gone to the medical examiner with every last anatomical detail in its proper place. As for Silas . . . well, it looks as if he really mightbe dead, but I don’t know what to believe anymore. What else have you got for me?”

“Not much,” Madoc admitted with an apologetic sigh. “The way the latest round of false testimony is being set in place, it looksas if this guy Nahal had some kind of grudge against your father and his cronies that he’d been nursing for a hundred years. It looksas if Nahal had Arnett snatched, and that he put out the counterfeit Operator one-oh-one stuff himself—although the word is already out that the woman who built up the Operator one-oh-one name and reputation has turned herself in to prove that her name’s been taken in vain. If you want stand-up proof that the realmovers and shakers are PicoCon people, I don’t have any—and I don’t think you or I could ever come up with any. Do you think theykilled Arnett so he couldn’t retract his confessions?”

Damon shrugged. “I haven’t been idling around while you’ve been battling it out with the LAPD,” he said. “I got kidnapped twice—once by Karol’s hirelings and once by some people who didn’t want Karol’s hirelings to put me away. The second crowd introduced me to the VE to end all VEs—a manufactured dream, of the kind the industry’s been trying to develop for a century and more. It might have been a trick, and I suppose it mighthave been a real dream—but if it wasn’t the spokesman for the movers and shakers gave me a message to pass on to my dead father. Then they stuck me in a derelict house with Lenny’s friend Cathy to wait for the bloodhounds.” After a slight pause he went on: “The Old Lady has to be right. No one but PicoCon could have access to VE tech that far ahead of the market—although the guy I talked to, whose image was all tricked out like some chrome-plated holovid robot, spun me some line about products not being made for the market anymore.”

“Lenny told me about Cathy,” Madoc said. “Was she in on Arnett’s kidnap?”

“I don’t think so—although they probably planted the centipedes that disabled Silas’s defenses in her luggage when they found out he’d invited her to stay. Her abduction was just a red herring. Whoever’s doing this—and I mean the individual in charge of the operation, not the corp—believes in having his fun while he works.”

“What was the message to your father?” Madoc asked curiously but tentatively. He obviously half expected to be told that it wasn’t his business.

Damon didn’t see any need to keep that particular secret. “Stop playing God,” he said bluntly. When Madoc raised his eyebrows, expecting further elaboration, he added: “Apparently, everybody who’s anybody wants to play God nowadays, and the biggods way up on Olympus are trying to figure out a set of protocols that will allow them all to play together. They want everybody to abide by the rules. If the story I was told can be taken seriously, this thing got started because my foster parents turned churlish when they were invited to join the club. So did the people at Ahasuerus. The alleged purpose of this little game is simply to force them to play ball, but the fact that it’s being formulated as a game certainly doesn’t mean that it’s harmless. You know what they say: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.’”