“I’ve never gone in for cosmetic reconstruction,” Damon told him warily. “I have no idea what my mother looked like; I don’t even know her name. I understand that her ova were stripped and frozen at the height of the Crisis, when they were afraid that the world’s entire stock might be wiped out by the plague. There’s no surviving record of her. At that time, according to my foster parents, nobody was overly particular about where healthy ova came from; they just wanted to get as many as they could in the bank. They were stripping them from anyone more than five years old, so it’s possible that my mother was a mere infant.”

“It’s possible, then, that your natural mother is still alive,” Yamanaka commented, with a casualness that was probably feigned.

“If she is,” Damon pointed out, “she can’t possibly know that one of her ova was inseminated by Conrad Helier’s sperm and that I was the result.”

“I suppose Eveline Hywood and Mary Hallam must both have been infected before their wombs could be stripped,” Yamanaka said, disregarding the taboos that would presumably continue to inhibit free conversation regarding the legacy of the plague until the last survivors of the Crisis had retired from public life. “Or was it just that Conrad Helier was reluctant to select one of your foster parents as a natural mother in case it affected the partnership?”

“I don’t think any of this is relevant to the matters you’re investigating,” Damon said. “The kidnapping is the important thing—the other thing was probably posted simply to confuse the matter.”

“I can’t tell as yet what might be relevant and what might not,” Yamanaka said unapologetically. “The message supposedly deposited by Operator one-oh-one might be pure froth, and there might be nothing sinister in the fact that I can’t contact Surinder Nahal—but if Silas Arnett really has been seized by Eliminators this could represent the beginning of a new and nastier phase of that particular species of terrorism. Eliminators already attract far too much media attention, and this story might well become headline news. I’d like to stay one step ahead of the dozens of newsmen who must have been commissioned to start digging—in fact, I needto stay at least one step ahead of them because they’ll certainly confuse the issue once they begin stirring things up. I’m sorry to have troubled you, Mr. Hart, but I thought it best that I contact you directly to inform you of what had happened. If you think of anything that might help us, it might be to your own advantage to let us know immediately.”

He’s implying that I might be in danger too, Damon thought. If he’s right, and the message is connected to Silas’s disappearance, this really might be the beginning of something nasty—even if it’s only a news-tape hatchet job. “I’ll ask around,” he said carefully. “If I discover anything that might help you, I’ll be sure to let you know.”

“Thank you, Mr. Hart,” the man from Interpol said, offering no clue as to exactly what he understood by Damon’s promise to ask around. “I’m grateful for your cooperation.”

When he had closed the door behind his unwelcome visitors Damon pulled the carving knife out of the jamb, wondering what Sergeant Rolfe had made of it. Would Interpol be checking Diana’s record as carefully as they had checked his? Would they find anything there to connect her to the Eliminators? Probably not—but how well did heknow her? How well had he everknown her? And where would she go, now that she was homeless again? Might she too become “untraceable,” like Silas Arnett and Surinder Nahal? Suddenly, he felt an urgent need of someone to talk to—and realized belatedly that since he had quit the fight game he had gradually transferred all his conversational eggs to one basket. Now that Diana was gone, there was no one who regularly passed the time of day with him except the censorious elevator, which didn’t even qualify as a worm-level AI.

All I want is a chance to work, he thought. All I need is the space to get on with my own projects. None of this is anything to do with me. But he knew, even as he voiced the thought within the virtual environment of his mind, that he didn’t have the authority to decide that he was uninvolved in this affair. Nor, he realized—slightly to his surprise—was he able to attain the level of indifference that would allow him simply to turn his back on the mystery. In spite of everything that had happened to spoil the relationship between himself and his foster parents, he still cared—about Silas Arnett, at least.

Oh, Silas, he thought, what on earth have you done? Who can you possibly have annoyed sufficiently to get yourself kidnapped? And why have the Eliminators turned their attention to a saint who’s been dead for nearly fifty years?

Four

D

amon knew that there was no point searching the apartment for the bugs that Sergeant Rolfe had planted while he was wandering around. Interpol undoubtedly had nanomachines clever enough to evade detection by his antique sweeper. Nor was he about to ask for help—Building Security had better sweepers but they also had a rather flexible view of the right to privacy that they were supposedly there to guarantee. He had enough demerits on his account already without giving formal notification of the fact that he was under investigation by a high-level law enforcement agency.

Instead, he donned his phone hood and started making calls.

It was, as he’d anticipated, a waste of time. Everybody in the world—not to mention everybody off-world—had a beltpack and a personal call-number, but that didn’t mean that anybody in the world was accessible twenty-four hours a day. Everybody in the world also had an AI answering machine, which functioned for most people as a primary status symbol as well as a protector of privacy, and which needed to be shown off if they were to perform that function adequately. The higher a man’s social profile was the cleverer his AI needed to be at fielding and filtering calls. Damon usually had no cause to regret the trend—customizing virtual environments for the AI simulacra to inhabit provided nearly 40 percent of his business—but whenever he actually wanted to make urgent contact with some people he found the endless routine of stagy reply sequences just as frustrating as anyone else.

Karol Kachellek’s simulacrum was standing on a photo-derived Hawaiian beach with muted breakers rolling in behind him. The unsmiling simulacrum brusquely reported that Karol was busy operating a deep-sea dredger by remote control and couldn’t be disturbed. It warned Damon that his call was unlikely to be returned for several hours, and perhaps not until the next day.

Damon told the sim that the matter was urgent, but the assurances he received in return were patently hollow.

Eveline Hywood’s simulacrum wasn’t even full length; it was just a detached head floating in what Damon took to be a straightforward replication of her lab. The room’s only decoration—if even that could be reckoned a mere ornament—was a window looking out upon a rich star field. It was the kind of panorama which people who lived with five miles of atmosphere above their heavy heads only ever got to see in virtual form, and it therefore functioned as a status symbol, even though Lagrangists were supposed to be above that sort of thing. The sim’s gray hair was trimmed to a mere fuzz, according to the prevailing minimalist philosophy of the microgee colonists, but its features were slightly more naturalistic than those Karol had contrived for his alter ego.

The sim told Damon that Eveline was working on a delicate series of experiments and wouldn’t be returning any calls for at least twenty-four hours. Again, Damon told the sim that the matter was urgent—but the sim looked back at him with a cold hauteur which silently informed him that nothinghappening on Earth could possibly be urgent by comparison with the labor of a dedicated Lagrangist.