"What's this for?" she asked.

"We'll be leaving the crawler at a station about a hundred kilometers from here. This is to get you through customs." She took a forearm from a metal lifetank and attached it to her black bag. The white chunk of meat began to color, and the fingers twitched. She popped Lilo's own arm into the tank.

"I'm Mari," she said, with a slight rising inflection on the end. There was the hint of a smile on her face.

"Lilo," she responded, and they touched palms, Lilo's right to Mari's left since Lilo was not equipped at the moment to do it properly.

"That'll be ready in a minute," she said, gesturing to the arm. She was reaching into a bag on the shelf behind her. There were two deep purple robes in it. She stood up to pull one over her head. "You can put that on when I'm done with you."

"Where am I being taken?"

"To see the Boss." There was a tone in her voice that said Mari respected the Boss a great deal. So she was a Free Earther. Well, it wasn't exactly a disease. Lilo could tolerate them, except when it came to a fanatic like Tweed who wanted to lead the whole race into oblivion.

Mari got to work again, fitting the elbow joint together, attaching tendons, splicing nerves and vessels. In five minutes the skin sealed up and there was nothing but a faint red line to show where the arm had been grafted. She pulled a plug from the socket at the back of Lilo's head and the arm became more than dead weight. It was full of pins and needles, and cold.

"Sorry about the job," Mari said, packing things away. "You'll only need it for an hour or so, so there's no sense, is there? You won't have to use it much."

"That's okay. I'm right-handed." She made a fist. The arm was about five centimeters too short.

"Oh, really? So is my mother."

"Whose is this?"

"It was grown from somebody who is supposed to be in Luna. We put the genotype through customs every so often so the computer has a record of her... but I don't think I should be telling you this."

"Suit yourself." Lilo had figured it was something like that.

"You don't look very happy for a woman who's just busted out of an escape-proof jail," Mari said. Her smile had grown by stages; now it was wide and friendly. Lilo felt herself smile back.

"I guess I haven't had time to react. I've lived with a death sentence for so long."

Mari shifted a little closer. "Would you like to cop?"

"No, thanks. I guess I'd like to start with a man, after such a long time."

"Sure." The medico turned her attention to the flat, pitted landscape and angular shadows out the window.

Lilo tried to come to terms with the fact that she now had a chance to survive. It still didn't mean anything to her. She kept thinking of that other woman, the clone, who would die in her place. She began to cry, surrendering herself to the confused emotions that had to get out. It was not until Mari decided she had gone through enough and touched her on the shoulder that Lilo realized how hungry she had been for a friendly face, for the touch of another human being. She calmed down almost at once. Mari started to withdraw her arm, but Lilo stopped her with a touch.

"How long till we get there?"

Mari glanced at the chronometer on her thumbnail. "About two hours. Would you like to cop now? It might be the best thing for you. I know a little of what you're going through."

"Oh, what the hell." So they did. Mari had been right; it did untie some of the knots in her gut. Mari was skilled and considerate, a good player except for a tendency to talk shop. She would kiss something—nose, navel, knee, labia—and want to know who had done the work. Usually the answer was "it just grew that way."

Mari scored most of the points. Lilo was too distracted to pay much attention to what her mouth and fingers were doing. She knew she had been a poor partner, but Mari said it was all right, and seemed to mean it. It was a nice gesture, but didn't seem to merit the second upwelling of tears that it caused in Lilo. When it subsided she knew the medico had brought her out of the emotional pit she had occupied for the past year in a way the intellectual knowledge of her reprieve could not have done. She was going to live!

The crawler stopped at Herschel, one of the smaller warrens on the outskirts of the Central Highlands. Mari drove into town to catch the local tube to Panavision. Lilo kept her eyes open for a chance to run, but they were quickly joined by a man and woman. They laughed and joked with Mari, but it was clear they were watchful. The chance would come, she was sure of it. It would be best to wait until she knew a little more of the situation.

She put her hand into the customs machine and felt the sampler scrape along the dry skin of her palm. It clucked to itself, and was satisfied she was someone else. Too bad she wouldn't be able to keep the new hand, she reflected. It would be invaluable. But tissue rejection made that impossible. In less than a week it would die.

Panavision was an artists' town, full of performers and directors. Many of them had been altered into a part; it was an outlandish place. They joined the line for the gravity train to Archimedes. The four of them boarded, the car was sealed, and Lilo's weight dropped away as the car fell down the inclined tunnel for almost four hundred kilometers. Somewhere under the Apennines the tunnel began to slope up again, gradually slowing their speed to a crawl as the car nosed into the elevator which took them back up to inhabited levels. The trip was over by the time Lilo felt settled in her seat.

The Grand Concourse at Archimedes was frightening. She had forgotten there were that many people or that much noise. There was no time to worry about it; she was hustled through the crowds to a private tube station. When she got her wits back, she saw she was alone again with Mari in an eight-seat capsule.

"Where now?"

"I'm not supposed to say," Mari said, with a shrug.

It didn't take Lilo long to figure it out. Most Lunarians know little selenography. They might not get out on the surface more than once or twice in several years, most likely for a trip like that Lilo and Mari were taking: enclosed in a capsule riding an induction rail while landscape whizzed past the windows. But Lilo knew the surface map pretty well. They were going north into the Imbrium flats, and when peaks began to loom up over the horizon she knew it was the Spitzbergen Mountains. So that was where the Boss lived. That kind of information was not exactly a state secret; but it was not advertised, because of the constant danger of assassination.

Tweed's home was on the surface—as it logically would be, Lilo realized, so he could see Earth at all times. Tweed was obsessed by Earth, and by the Invaders. There was one massive geodesic, surrounded by clusters of smaller ones. A spidery telescope with a twenty-meter mirror stood in the shadow of a cupola. It was trained on Earth.

Mari cut away the arm and replaced it with the original, then said Tweed was waiting for Lilo in the main dome. She pointed the way. Lilo took her time, looking into open doorways she passed. There would be just the one tube station, and the suits would be carefully watched. She fully realized this was as much a prison as the institute had been, but the time to start planning was right now.

Water was flowing down the hall. She splashed through it until the hall became a brook running through trees, in an artful mix of holos and real plants. She hadn't detected the transition. The creek bed was lined with polished stones of varicolored crystal and the deeper pools were full of fish. A panther studied her from the shore, joined her as she reached dry land, and stropped himself against her after smelling the fur on her calves. She fussed with him for a while, then sent him away with a cuff on the head.