Serrin looked at Michael long and hard. "You're a freak," he said finally.

"Yup," Michael smiled happily. "Most people say that to me inside an hour of meeting me. You're very polite for a sep. Got any English blood in you?"

The elf shook his head and made for the shower. By the time he'd emerged from it, shaved and bathed and happier with life, he heard Michael and Tom in earnest conversation.

"No, you're wrong," Michael was saying animately. "We need a hell of a lot less emotion in people. The better educated, more intelligent, more analytical people are, the better they can see the bulldrek all around them and start thinking about it."

"You don't need to think to know that some things are wrong," the troll said simply. "It's something you've got to feel. If you don't feel, you ain't got any sense of right and wrong."

"Sure, but " Michael broke off as Serrin wandered back into view.

The Englishman looked faintly sheepish. "Sorry, old boy. I'll get back to the grindstone. I've been having a fascinating discussion with Tom." He got up from the table and headed for the second work room, fingering the datajack on his temple. "Excuse me. As we Brits are prone to say, I may be gone some time." He closed the door behind him.

"He's weird," sighed the elf.

"Are all these British like that?" the troll asked.

Serrin laughed. "Not entirely. Not all the time. But he's good at his work. He's doing what we need."

The troll grunted and made some comment about lunch.

"We could raid the freezer, or we could head for somewhere in town. I'm a bit paranoid about going out. We'd be safer here."

"I need the fresh air," Tom complained. "Anyway, I've seen his fridge. He only eats food without anything in it. It's all skimmed this and no-calorie that. A troll could die of starvation up here."

"Well, I guess nobody would recognize me in those ridiculous clothes," Serrin sighed. "I'll keep checking astrally too. I've already been doing that."

"I noticed," the troll said.

"I think I remember seeing someplace where you can get all the pizza and pasta you want for ten bucks, even if you're a troll. As long as you're with someone who isn't. That way, twenty covers you and the other guy," the elf said.

"If you've got your Predator, I've got my Room-sweeper," the troll sniffed. "I got an empty belly too. Now, where is this place?"

The alert from Tracey surprised him. Most of the frame-decking had been pretty simple, but this time Michael was getting a message that the Zulu Nation system he'd tried to get into was an expert system. That spelled danger. The only reason he'd checked it was because a flight from New Hlobane had arrived in JFK fifteen minutes before Serrin had fled for Frankfurt. Which intrigued him. The schedule for European and Japanese flights was exactly what he'd expected to find, but a direct flight from the Zulu capital into New York's JFK was not. That startling fact stood out like a grain of grit in vaseline. Now the frame was telling him these Zulus had some serious design work in their police systems.

Serrin and Tom were still out, so he rigged himself up with a cardiomonitor and respiratory analyzer and jacked in. Appearing in the virtual reality of the Matrix as a professor, complete with gown and mortar board, he gripped the violin case that carried his machine-gun attack utility and headed out the long route of datalines across the Atlantic.

The frame had already ferreted out the SAN number for the Zulu system, so he knew where to go. What he didn't know was whether there was any system alert; Tracey would have disengaged before finding out. He switched to evasion mode, minimizing his chances of being detected until he could determine whether any alarm programs had been triggered.

The system access node appeared to him as a circle of grassland hemmed in by broad-leaved, thick-barked trees swaying slightly in some unknown breeze. The sleeping lioness wasn't a surprise, though he didn't like her proximity to the rope bridge across the stream in the distance. Even more worrisome was the vulture sitting peacefully in one of the trees. He had no way of even guessing what kind of construct it might be.

Inching forward he felt the familiar tug at his senses. This was a sculpted system, of course, custom-designed and much more difficult to maneuver than a system using standard icon imagery. He assumed that it wouldn't be too difficult to force this system to accept his persona, the icon by which he existed in this illusory electron world, but that vulture seemed ominous. Not because of what it was doing, but precisely because it wasn't doing anything. Scanner program, he guessed, but he wanted to be sure.

What it turned out to be was a lot worse than that.

He let fly the little bird of prey, the hawk that was his analyze program, to circle above the vulture while he stayed where he was, keeping an eye on the lioness. The analyzing hawk came back with some conflicting signals. Trying to make sense of it, he concentrated on seeing through the hawk's eyes.

The wings of the vulture showed a bizarre patterning, each feather with a pattern halfway between a simple spiral and a feathered fractal. Its eyes scanned everything at an impossible speed, not so much flitting around as zooming.

He had to admit it was wiz: an infinite-regress element. It was, of course, a detection program, and was entirely self-referencing. In a sculpted system, the damn thing knew exactly what was allowed in here and what wasn't. If he tried to overcome the reality of this system, it was going to squawk. If he tried to defeat it, it had an infinitely self-checking algorithm that would actually respond to its defeat. And if he tried to defeat the algorithm amp; Michael got dizzy just thinking about the possibilities.

And this was just at the entrance to the system? What else did these cobbers have in here? He allowed his persona to change, accepting the slight disorientation that would bring. Now appearing in the form of a tall, spear-bearing Zulu, he strode forward to the bridge, and

switched to bod mode. In a system like this, any specialized mode of operation left too many relative weaknesses for his liking.

He took a chance on a smoke program, needing to quickly defeat the defenses of this first node. That would penalize him too, but Michael had enough confidence in his own skills not to worry overmuch. A swarm of noisy parrots filled the scene just as the lioness awoke and opened her throat to growl. Frag it, he thought, I took her for killer 1C, but it's another detection program. Surely?

Michael quit the attack program and engaged a sleaze instead. Instead of the infinitely unfolding plastic wallet of passes and permits and wads of bills, which was the program's usual image, his spear became a tribal charm, an intricate gold and silver design wholly unfamiliar to him. The lioness looked at it and yawned, a rippling growl coming from deep in her throat. Sweating a little, he edged past her toward the bridge.

That bridge has got to be barrier 1C, he thought. And he had the horrible feeling that it was probably pretty active most of the time. Try to cross that bridge and he'd find himself surrounded by killer giraffes or something. He brought the hawk to him to check it out.

The bird set one foot uncertainly on the bridge. Now that he knew it was barrier, Michael engaged the sleaze program again to get past it undetected. Neatly, the spear changed again into a snake, undulating its way across the bridge, its body touching only alternate wooden planks. Carefully taking the same route, the warrior icon followed it.

The jungle clearing beyond was standard fare, as were the tunnel-like pathways cut through the thick vegetation beyond that. This was the SPU, and down those pathways were the dataline junctions, he figured. The hawk told him there was nothing in the SPU itself; the clearing was empty.