"Oh, hi.  I was just talking with the CMP."  She thought off her peecee.  "Have a seat."

He pulled up a chair and hunched down over the table.  Confronted by her, he found it took a slight but noticeable effort to draw his breath.  "So.  How are things going?"

"They'll be trying out your controllers soon.  The first batch of chips ought to be coming out of the factories in an hour or so.  I thought I'd stay up to see how they work out."

"It's that bad, then?"  Ekatarina shook her head, would not look at him.  "Hey, come on, here you are waiting up on the results, and I can see how tired you are.  There must be a lot riding on this thing."

"More than you know," she said bleakly.  "I've just been going over the  numbers.  Things are worse than you can imagine."

He reached out and took her cold, bloodless hand.  She squeezed him so tightly it hurt.  Their eyes met and he saw in hers all the fear and wonder he felt.

Wordlessly, they stood.

"I'm niching alone,"  Ekatarina said.  She had not let go of his hand, held it so tightly in fact, that it seemed she would never let it go.

Gunther let her lead him away.

They made love, and talked quietly about inconsequential things, and made love again.  Gunther had thought she would nod off immediately after the first time, but she was too full of nervous energy for that.

"Tell me when you're about to come," she murmured.  "Tell me when you're coming."

He stopped moving.  "Why do you always say that?"

Ekatarina looked up at him dazedly, and he repeated the question.  Then she laughed a deep, throaty laugh.  "Because I'm frigid."

"Hah?"

She took his hand, and brushed her cheek against it. Then she ducked her head, continuing the motion across her neck and up the side of her scalp.  He felt the short, prickly hair against his palm and then, behind her ear, two bumps under the skin where biochips had been implanted.  One of those would be her trance chip and the other ...  "It's a prosthetic," she explained.  Her eyes were grey and solemn.  "It hooks into the pleasure centers.  When I need to, I can turn on my orgasm at a thought.  That way we can always come at the same time."  She moved her hips slowly beneath him as  she spoke.

"But that means you don't really need to have any kind of sexual stimulation at all, do you?  You can trigger an orgasm at will.  While you're riding on a bus.  Or behind a desk.  You could just turn that thing on and come for hours at a time."

She looked amused.  "I'll tell you a secret.  When it was new, I used to do stunts like that.  Everybody does.  One outgrows that sort of thing quickly."

With more than a touch of stung pride, Gunther said, "Then what am I doing here?   If you've got that thing, what the hell do you need me for?"  He started to draw away from her.

She pulled him down atop her again.  "You're kind of comforting," she said.  "In an argumentative way.  Come here."

He got back to his futon and began gathering up the pieces of his suit.  Liza sat up sleepily and gawked at him.  "So," she said.  "It's like that, is it?"

"Yeah, well.  I kind of left something unfinished.  An old relationship."  Warily, he extended a hand.  "No hard feelings, huh?"

Ignoring his hand, she stood, naked and angry.  "You got the nerve to stand there without even wiping my smile off your dick first and say no hard feelings?  Asshole!"

"Aw, come on now, Liza, it's not like that."

"Like hell it's not!  You got a shot at that white-assed Russian ice queen, and I'm history.  Don't think I don't know all about her."

"I was hoping we could still be, you know, friends."

"Nice trick, shithead."  She balled her fist and hit him hard in the center of his chest.  Tears began to form in her eyes.  "You just slink away.  I'm tired of looking at you."

He left.

But did not sleep.  Ekatarina was awake and ebullient over the first reports coming in of the new controller system.  "They're working!" she cried.  "They're working!"  She'd pulled on a silk camisole, and strode back and forth excitedly, naked to the waist.  Her pubic hair was a white flame, with almost invisible trails of smaller hairs reaching for her navel and caressing the sweet insides of her thighs.  Tired as he was, Gunther felt new desire for her.  In a weary, washed-out way, he was happy.

"Whooh!"  She kissed him hard, not sexually, and called up the CMP.  "Rerun all our earlier projections.  We're putting our afflicted components back to work.  Adjust all work schedules."

"As you direct."

"How does this change our long-range prospects?"

The program was silent for several seconds, processing.  Then it said, "You are about to enter a necessary but very dangerous stage of recovery.  You are going from a low-prospects high-stability situation to a high-prospects high-instability one.  With leisure your unafflicted components will quickly grow dissatisfied with your government."

"What happens if I just step down?"

"Prospects worsen drastically."

Ekatarina ducked her head.  "All right, what's likely to be our most pressing new problem?"

"The unafflicted components will demand to know more about the war on Earth.  They'll want the media feeds restored immediately."

"I could rig up a receiver easily enough," Gunther volunteered.  "Nothing fancy, but ..."

"Don't you dare!"

"Hah?  Why not?"

"Gunther, let me put it to you this way:  What two nationalities are most heavily represented here?"

"Well, I guess that would be Russia and--oh."

"Oh is right.  For the time being, I think it's best if nobody knows for sure who's supposed to be enemies with whom."  She asked the CMP, "How should I respond?"

"Until the situation stabilizes, you have no choice but distraction.  Keep their minds occupied.  Hunt down the saboteurs and then organize war crime trials."

"That's out.  No witch hunts, no scapegoats, no trials.  We're all in this together."

Emotionlessly, the CMP said, "Violence is the left hand of government.  You are rash to dismiss its potentials without serious thought."

"I won't discuss it."

"Very well.  If you wish to postpone the use of force for the present, you could hold a hunt for the weapon used on Bootstrap.  Locating and identifying it would involve everyone's energies without necessarily implicating anybody.  It would also be widely interpreted as meaning an eventual cure was possible, thus boosting the general morale without your actually lying."

Tiredly, as if this were something she had gone over many times already, she said, "Is there really no hope of curing them?"

"Anything is possible.  In light of present resources, though, it cannot be considered likely."

Ekatarina thought the peecee off, dismissing the CMP.  She sighed. "Maybe that's what we ought to do.  Donkey up a hunt for the weapon.  We ought to be able to do something with that notion."

Puzzled, Gunther said, "But it was one of Chang's weapons, wasn't it?  A schizomimetic engine, right?"

"Where did you hear that?" she demanded sharply.

"Well, Krishna said ...  He didn't act like ...  I thought it was public knowledge."

Ekatarina's face hardened.  "Program!" she thought.

The CMP came back to life.  "Ready."

"Locate Krishna Narasimhan, unafflicted, Cadre Five.  I want to speak with him immediately."  Ekatarina snatched up her panties and shorts, and furiously began dressing.  "Where are my damned sandals?  Program!  Tell him to meet me in the common room.  Right away."

"Received."

To Gunther's surprise, it took over an hour for Ekatarina to browbeat Krishna into submission.  Finally, though, the young research component went to a lockbox, identified himself to it, and unsealed the storage areas.  "It's not all that secure," he said apologetically.  "If our sponsors knew how often we just left everything open so we could get in and out, they'd--well, never mind."