Kyaren went to Mexico for the feel of people. Nowhere in Eastamerica, and certainly nowhere in the Songhouse, were there people like those who crowded the sidewalks of Mexico. No vehicles were allowed except the electric carts that brought in goods to the stores; people, individual people, had to walk everywhere. And there were millions of them. And they all seemed to be outside all the time; even in the rain, they sauntered through the streets with the rain sliding easily off their clothing, relishing the feel of it on their faces. This was a city where Kyaren's hunger could be filled. She knew no one, but loved everyone.

They sweat, Josif said.

You're too immaculate, Kyaren answered crossly.

They sweat and they step on your feet. I see no reason to be in a crowd any more than is unavoidable.

I like the sound of them.

And that's the worst of it. Largest city in the world, and they insist on speaking Mexican, a language that has no reason to exist.

Kyaren only scowled at him. Why not?

They're only five thousand kilometers from Seattle, for heaven's sake. We managed to talk like the rest of the empire. It's just vanity.

It's a beautiful language, you know, she said. I've been learning it, and it opens your mind.

And makes your tongue fall out of your mouth.

Josif had no patience with the eccentricities of his native planet.

Sometimes I'm embarrassed as hell to be from Earth."

The mother globe.

These people aren't real Mexicans. Do you know what Mexicans were? Short and dark! Show me a short dark person out there!

Does it matter if they can trace their pedigrees back to the number one Mexican and her husband? Kyaren demanded. They want to be Mexican. And whenever I come here, I want to be Mexican.

It was a friendly argument that always ended either with them going outside-Kyaren to wander and talk to storekeepers and shoppers, Josif to prowl along the shelves, waiting for a title to make a sudden move so he could pounce-or in bed, where their pursuits more nearly coincided.

It was on a weekend in Mexico that they decided to take over the world.

Why not the universe?

Your ambition is disgusting, Josif said, lying naked on the balcony because he liked the feel of the rain, which was falling heavily.

Well, then, we'll be modest. Where shall we start?

Here.

Not practical. We have no base of operations.

Tegucigalpa, then. We secretly twist all the programs of the computers to follow our every command. Then we cut off everybody's salaries until they surrender.

They laughed; it was a game. But a game they played seriously enough to do research. They would hunt for possible weaknesses, places where the system could be subverted. They also worked to get an overview of the system, to understand how it all fit together. Josif knew his way around the government library in Mexico, and they both spent time punching up readouts on the establishment of Tegucigalpa only three hundred-odd years before.

The thing's relatively new. Half the functions have only been installed in the last ten years. Ten years! And most other planets have been fully computerized for centuries.

You're too down on Earth, Kyaren chided him, poring over minutes of meetings, which were so heavily edited at their level of clearance that it was hard to get anything coherent out of them at all.

But it was not in Mexico that they found the scam. It was at home.

Kyaren had been reading a book on demographics, one that she had only been able to skim at Princeton. It set norms for age distributions on a planet; she found the information fascinating, especially the variations that depended on local employment, climate, and relative wealth. She amused herself by plotting the demographic distribution of ages for Earth, based on the easily obtained statistics on employment and the economy. Then she took a few minutes of break time at work to check her figures.

They were wrong.

From birth to retirement age at 80, her figures were actually quite good. It was from 80 to 100 that things didn't work.

Not enough people were dying at those ages.

In fact, she realized, almost no one was dying, compared to the normal mortality rates. And then, from 100 to 110, they died like flies, so that from 110 on the statistics were normal.

Surely someone would have noticed this before, Kyaren thought. Certainly the Earth would have gained a reputation for unusually low mortality rates. It had to be common knowledge-the food distribution must certainly be affected by it, and pension expenses must be unusually high. Scientists must be trying to discover the reason for the phenomenon.

And yet she had never heard of it at all

In the programming manuals they had looked at in the library in Mexico, Kyaren had found some little-known programs that allowed an operator to check a program rather than use It to find and process data. Kyaren talked to Josif about it that night, which they spent at his place because it was larger and had room for both of them without having to petition for extra furniture, which would have made their arrangement public knowledge.

I've checked my figures again and again, and they're not wrong.

Well, the only way to solve it is go kill some old people, I guess, Josif said, reading a twenty-third-century mystery-in translation, of course.

Josif, it's wrong. Something's wrong. Kyaren, he said, impatient but trying not to sound like it, this is a game we were playing. We really don't have any responsibility for the whole world. Just for dead people and the not-quite-dead. And then just as numbers.

I want to find out if the figures on death are right or not.

Josif closed the book. Kyaren, the figures on death are right. That's my job, isn't it? I do death.

Then check and see if my figures are right,

He checked. Her figures were right.

Your figures are right. Maybe the book's wrong.

It's been the bible of demographics for three centuries. Someone would have noticed by now.

Josif opened the book again. Damned Earth. The people don't even know when to die.

You must have noticed it, Kyaren said. You must have seen that most of your deaths were grouped between a hundred and a hundred and ten.

I've never noticed anything like that. We deal with individuals, not the aggregate. We terminate files, you know? We don't watch trends.

I just want to check some things. You know that program we found on checking entries? The error-finder?

Yeah.

Remember the numbers?

Kyaren, you're not being very good company.

Together they figured out the numbers and codes; Kyaren left for a few minutes and verified them on the local library terminal by hunting up her last library use. The program worked fine; it was quite simple, in fact, which was why they were able to remember it.

The next day, during a break, Kyaren punched in a date-of-entry query on the solitary death in Quong-yung district-she figured a single death would be simpler, would give her a single readout. What should have flashed on her screen was the date of entry, the name of the operator who entered the death information, the vital statistics entered on that date on that person, and the operation number.

Instead, what flashed on was the bright RESTRICTED sign and what sounded was a loud buzzer at Warvel's desk.

Everyone looked up immediately, watched as Warvel got up quickly, looking alarmed. Kyaren knew that on his desk her area was flashing;-sure enough, when he located the culprit he slammed his hand on the desk and charged furiously over to her.

What the bloody hell are you doing, Kyaren! he bawled as he came over.

What should she tell him-that she was playing a game of plotting to take over the world? That she was double-checking the figures because they didn't jibe with her own calculations?