One foot waving over the big empty, I grab for his arm with my free hand.

“Eeee!” I miss and grab his head by mistake. He responds by shoving me back toward the edge. His feet grip the balcony as if glued, but I am twice his height and at least five times his mass. Then he raises the mace again. I panic and brace my other hand on his shoulder and push with full force, trying to get as much distance between myself and the thing as possible. Only I forget to let go.

His head comes off in my hand. The body falls limply, clattering to the balcony: pale fluid dribbles from the stump of his neck, sealing it off from further damage. The mace buzzes and whirs menacingly. Anything it touches will die. I give it a wide berth as I raise his head toward the Domina, glaring at her.

“You’ll be sorry,” says the head, using electrospeech in place of its missing larynx.

“He’s right,” the Domina agrees, smiling right at me. She seems to be amused. “Stone has a vindictive drive, you know. You’ll need to run a long way, manikin, and hope he won’t find you wherever you hide.”

“Will he come after me if I drop him?” I ask, holding my arm out over the edge of the balcony. I take a cautious step backward along the slippery edge, probing for safe footing with my spiked left heel.

“You won’t do that,” the Domina says thoughtfully. “He’s very popular — he has more than two thousand sibs, and they’ll all claim feud on you and yours.” She laughs quietly. “Wouldn’t that be amusing?” Her companion giggles conspiratorially, echoing her mistress. “Go ahead and drop him, manikin. Maybe I’ll give you a head start.”

I turn Stone’s head to face her and examine the back of his cranial stump. As I expected, there’s a soul chip in place, the recording angel to his misdeeds. I extend two fingernails and dig it out of the socket. Then I hold it in front of his eyes. His lips are still moving: Good. “Watch.” I flick it out into the wild and cloudy air beyond the edge of our floating world. “Say good-bye to your backup, Stone.” Even if he sticks in a new one, it’ll take him a while to begin laying down memories again, and months for the older experiences to begin settling into the chip — such as this incident. Until then he won’t be able to pass on his experiences to his sibs. I lower his head to the floor carefully. “If you come after me and I kill you again, you’ll have only yourself to blame.”

I take another step back, and there’s a glass door off to my right.

“Get you,” mouths the head, as I flee.

THIS IS NOT a place for the likes of me. I am not a gamer, and the pleasures on offer here are not aimed at those of my sort: I am an artifact of an earlier age, out of place and time, isolated and alone. Angry and frightened, I head for the oxidizing core of the palace. I find a service air lock big enough to admit me, and on the way through it I shower with liquid water, rinsing away my glad rags in a foaming stream. Glittering nails and spiked heels retract, nipples and pubes revert to normal. I keep my long red hair and my face because some aspects of identity are hard to do without, no matter how expensive; but more serviceable wear awaits me in the printer on the other side of the air lock, suited to my status as a lowly freelance worker. When I told the Domina that I was a free woman, I spoke truth, but just barely. My lineage and my sibs are free, but because we are free, we are also poor. One of life’s larger ironies.

I’m not on shift right now, but there’s casual work available if I want it. The cost of living here strains my resources, but it’s better than being stranded on the surface in a domed slum, renting my nervous system out to a carbon sequestration station’s analytics. I should really go looking for a rickshaw to pull, but I’m still edgy from my encounter with the Domina and her thug. So I head down to one of the sublevels under Environment and go looking for Victor.

Victor is a jazz piano, a xenomorph fallen upon hard times — a stringed instrument with heart, and a head, and arms, from a period when authenticity was in vogue. These days improv is unfashionable, running counter to the tastes of the mannered elite. The wrong type of melody can be taken as a criticism; aristos are quick to anger and quicker still to defend their honor. So Victor works in atmospheric maintenance by day shift and runs a movable acoustic feast in the service tunnels by night. Such places have been with us always, since the time when my True Love’s kind stalked old Earth, and we who remember them maintain the traditions. (We even drink aqueous solutions of ethanol, though not for the same reasons.)

I find Victor’s node in a pendulous vapor trap under one of the great extractor circuits that leaches sulfates out of the inner atmosphere of the oxidizing zone. He’s plated the walls with carbon black, grown an array of colored lights, and caused the floor to extrude foam pads that divide it up into soft-floored booths. The dive is quiet tonight, and Milton — Victor’s sometime waiter and partner in crime — is polishing the bar top lackadaisically. “Where’s the boss?” I ask, pausing beside him.

“Boss is in back, twinkle-tits.” Milton affects a malfunctioning voice, rasping and choppy. “What can I fetch ya?”

“A liter jug of the special. Hold the PEG.” Lots of serious drinkers like to add a shot of polyethylene glycol to their brew, but it makes it too sweet for my tastes.

“It’s your poison.” Milt shrugs with one pair of shoulders and serves up a pitcher. “That’ll be five centimes.”

I sign his note and carry the pitcher over to the boss man, who is sitting in a cozy niche against one wall and tapping away at his keyboard with one hand, surrounded by an appreciative audience of underemployed dustbusters. “Spare a moment, Vic?” I sit down opposite him.

He nods and keeps playing without breaking rhythm. The dustbusters are hypnotized; they flex their legs so that they sway from side to side where they stand. Some of them wear iridescent uniform shells, but most of the lowly cleaners are naked as they day they were duped and chipped, black many-legged tubes with heads that are little more than fringed hoses, each capped with a pair of little beady eyes. “Wasn’t expecting you tonight,” he admits. “Thought you were partying it up with chibi-san. Want to jam?”

“I’d like to, but not now, Vic.” I pause for a moment, listening to my inner voices. “I think I need to leave town.”

“Ah. Wait one.” He launches into a long, fiddly closing sequence and finishes up his line. The dustbusters wait for a few seconds after the last note dies away, then bounce up and down enthusiastically. “Take ten,” he announces to them. “You’re a great audience, but I need a recharge.” He flashes a signal at Milton, and across the bar hidden speakers reprise an earlier session. In moments, we’re on our own; the dustbusters are suckers for instant stimulation. “Is it serious?” he asks. “How far do you want to go?”

I consider my options. “Off-planet, probably.” My sibs are mostly on Earth; I may be the only one of my kind on Venus. “I offended an aristo.”

“You offended a — how?” He demands. His body language signals surprise: He strokes a rising chord progression on his keyboard.

“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.” I take a long pull on my pitcher. The special tastes strongly of creosote with undernotes of sulfur and syrup; a strong, chewy flavor that my tongue tells me would be utterly vile if I hadn’t had my olfactory system tweaked for Venusian norms. “Hmm, that’s nice.” There were refreshments in the gaming salon upstairs, rarefied concoctions for rich gourmets, but Victor’s brew is comforting.

“Ungood,” he says mildly. “Do you have the money to pay for off-world passage?”