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  I smiled, more like a nervous tic. “He’s going to give me his?” They were even stranger looking than mine. I wondered if he left them on the table at night when he slept. “He’s cybered, right?”

  “Of course he is. Do you think he could be Security Chief for a combine without augmentation?”

  “He looks pretty normal. I’ve seen some grotesques—”

  “Only a fool would advertise exactly what he can do.”

  I thought about that. “Depends on what you’re into, I guess.”

  “We’re not dealing with street gang pathology,” she said. I wasn’t so sure, but I didn’t say anything. I knew the combines didn’t allow most of their employees more than an occasional memory plug-in, besides what they needed to do their specific jobs. The higher you were in the network, the more augmentation you were allowed. If it was really good, it didn’t have to show; but if you had that kind of power, why not flaunt it? She said, “Most combines discourage flamboyant displays of personal engineering. Most of humanity still finds aberrance threatening.”

  “Yeah.” That made perfect sense. “I’ve noticed.” I touched my head.

  As if she hadn’t heard that, she reached into the soft leather bag she carried and pulled out a handful of holos. She tossed them out onto the tabletop in front of me. “These are some of the people you will have to recognize and deal with.” I couldn’t believe she didn’t have some better way of giving me information. Maybe Braedee was making it hard for her. I had the feeling she hadn’t been exactly welcome on this trip.

  I picked up a holo, stared at it. “Family portraits.” Not even a question. It was a picture of a middle-aged man, but the resemblance to Jule was so striking that a cold finger ran up my spine. I shuffled through the rest of them, holding the membranes up to the light, looking at profiles and full faces as they stared, yawned, smiled or frowned through a moment of their existence, over and over, trapped in a kink of time. Too many of them could almost have been Jule’s twin.

  Jardan named them, one by one, as I picked up the pictures. She didn’t really have to tell me which were the outsiders who’d married in.

  For the first time I saw Jule’s father, a grandfather, a great-grandmother, a cousin … a brother. I didn’t even know she had a brother. He looked just like her too. Holding images of her face over and over again, barely changing, began to make my fingers tingle as if mice were crawling over my hands. “Why do they all look like that? They all look just like her—”

  “Like who?”

  “Jule.”

  She looked at me blankly for a minute, before she remembered. “Oh. Yes,” she said, as if she was disposing of an unpleasant reminder. “As you may have gathered, Centauri Transport is something of an anomaly: they are still controlled by the heirs of their founder. After more than three hundred years, that is a rare accomplishment.”

  “So why do they look like clones? They’re not marrying each other—” I tossed the holo back onto the pile.

  “They control the transfer of their genetic material very strictly. Only a minimal amount of outside material is introduced into each new generation. They select for the psychological traits that have given them success in the past—and, obviously, for physical resemblance. It’s part of the control factor … part of their mystique, if you will.”

  Genetic incest. I thought about Jule—a psion, an empath and teleport born into that family of perfect mirror images reflecting back through centuries. A mistake. A mistake that had almost driven her insane. I wondered how it could have happened. I glanced at the pile of pictures again. “You have one of Jule’s mother?” Jule looked like her father. I didn’t know much about her family life, but nothing I’d heard about her father was good. I couldn’t help wondering what her mother was like.

  “Lady Sansu is dead.”

  I let the holo I was holding drop. I looked down at the pile again, realizing suddenly who else was missing. “Where’s Elnear?”

  “‘The Lady’,” Jardan said. “You will refer to her as ‘Lady Elnear.’ Or ‘ma’am.’”

  I grimaced. “So where’s ‘The Lady’s’ picture?”

  “You’ve never seen her?”

  I shook my head, wondering if she was supposed to be a threedy star too.

  She took one more holo out—out of her jacket, this time—and handed it to me, with all the careful respect that had been missing from the way she’d given me the rest.

  I took it between my thumb and finger, holding it up. “That’s her?” I said, surprised into asking it.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Nothing. Except…” Lady Elnear didn’t look at all like a taMing, which was a relief. But she was … ordinary. A woman who looked like she was past fifty, with a long face and too many teeth, colorless hair, a body that was doughy and soft. Her clothes fit like they didn’t belong to her. I looked up at Jardan, saw the resentment in her eyes, and almost couldn’t say it. “She’s not—beautiful. I mean … hell, they can afford it, right? They can get it fixed if they don’t like it, they can get all the systems running right, they can get their body clocks set back? They never have to get too fat or skinny or old.…”

  “Lady Elnear believes that there are better uses for her time and money than indulging in personal vanity.”

  “Hnh.” I glanced at the picture one last time. Lady Elnear looked tired and sad and horse-faced as she turned away from me, again and again. I handed the holo back.

  She put it away carefully in her jacket; piled the other holos up neatly and left them between us on the tabletop, like a small wall. Then she began to tell me How to Act: the official duties, the endless lies and phony rituals of people pretending to be decent to each other while all the time they were trying to get behind each others’ unprotected backs with knives. I set my brain on record and thought about other things … about getting jerked around like a puppet by fate and the combines. About seeing Earth … About Kissindre Perrymeade and whether she’d think my being gone was because of her. If she even noticed I was missing … I forgot where I was, and laughed.

  “Are you listening to me?” Jardan’s voice was as hard as a slap.

  I looked up, blinking. I fed the last few sentences she’d spoken back to her. “Don’t worry. Even if I fall asleep, I’ll remember it.”

  Her mouth thinned. “Do you actually understand any of this? You haven’t asked me a single question.”

  I frowned, because I hated what I was hearing, and hated being forced to listen to it … and hated to admit that maybe she was right. “It’s like getting the instructions for a machine you’ve never seen. It’s not going to make any sense till I get there. If I have questions, I’ll ask The Lady.”

  “Braedee!” She got up from her seat. Braedee appeared in the doorway before she’d finished the motion.

  “You’re pretty good at that, too,” I said sourly.

  “I’m through with him,” she said, meaning me. It sounded as final as if my next stop was the incinerator chute.

  “On the contrary.” Braedee shook his head.

  Her frown deepened. “He’ll never pass.”

  “For human?” Braedee’s eyes flicked over me, probably scanning me all up and down the spectrum, straight to my bones. “He will when I’m finished with him.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “He’ll have to. You—” He pointed at me. “Come with me.” I did.

  He led me to what looked like his personal lab. It wasn’t impressive, cool green and antiseptic tile, a lot of strange-surfaced alloys, but nothing that would make you want to get the hell out of there. But knowing who he was, and suspecting what he could do, I knew those walls probably hid as many secrets as his skin did. “Sit down,” he said. “I’m going to fix your eyes.” He nodded at a stool in front of what looked like some kind of scanner.

  “There’s nothing wrong with my eyes,” I said.

  “Don’t act stupid.” He shoved me toward the seat. “You look lik
e a freak.”

  “All I need is some eyeskins—” I hugged my elbows, looking toward the doorway.

  “I just want to look at your eye structure.” He sat down, waiting for me. I sat down too, slowly, and put my face against the headpiece. “Look at the rings.” Nothing inside but darkness, and a set of concentric rings floating in space like a target. I watched it for a long minute, squinting my eyes. Nothing. I began to relax.

  There was a sudden blow against my eyes, that wasn’t light or heat or pain, but somehow all three at once. I jerked back, swearing, rubbing my face. “You shit. What did you do to me?”

  “See for yourself,” he said. A mirrored plate slid down over the window in front of me. I stared at myself. The long slits of my pupils were changing while I watched, shrinking into pinpoints, the green of my irises filling in like crystal growth. “A simple molecular graft. Eyefilms would leave you half-blind in dim light. Not useful. Also detectable. This isn’t permanent, but you can have it made permanent.”

  I looked up at him, away from the perfectly ordinary human eyes staring back at me from the mirror; away from the expression on my face. “What makes you think I want to look like a human?” My voice sounded shaky again.

  He ignored that. “A little cosmetic facial surgery would be better.…” He hesitated, watching me. “But to do it safely takes more time than we’ve got. You can pass, I suppose; there are enough exotics around to make you look normal.”

  I took a deep breath, glancing at the locked storage units along the walls. He could turn my whole face into boneless mush with some of the virals he probably had in there.

  He smiled; he enjoyed keeping people off-balance. “Mez Jardan has told you everything she considers important—” Heavy on the sarcasm. No wonder she hated him. “Now I’m going to give you what you really need. You can use a standard access—?”

  “Sure,” I said, as if I’d been doing it all my life.

  He passed a programmed headset across the table. He had everything thing ready and waiting, every step planned. I took the headset, carefully. They always looked like a twitch would crush them, even though you could wad one up and keep it in your pocket for days. I dropped the net over my hair, waited a second while I cleared my thoughts out. Then I pressed the trodes to my forehead, and waited for the hard rush of image to hit me. I’d had some trouble learning to use one, because my mind wanted to treat the information feed like an invasion. But once I’d learned to access it was like being a sponge. I’d spent most of a standard year submerged, doing nothing but sucking up facts.

  This time there was a megadose of data about the rise of the combines and the Federation Transport Authority. Most of it repeated what I already knew about the bad blood between them, stretching back over centuries to Old Earth days. The FTA’s control of telhassium, and with it, of shipping and communications, meant that they butted heads with the transport networks every time they put an embargo on some government they wanted to toe their line better. It cost Centauri Transport every time the FTA wanted to make some other combine pay. Centauri hated their guts. They were the Big Enemy, to Centauri.

  But Centauri Transport had other problems, and the flow began to change color, getting more personal. Now it was intercombine warfare, shifting loyalties and alliances. Focus on Triple Gee, Centauri’s prime competitor, always looking for a way to give them grief. Anything it could get away with: goods delayed until the transport contract was invalid; an explosion in a fitting yard; a trade ambassador who never arrived to negotiate a deal, who never arrived anywhere again. Images of derelict vessels with breached hulls, bloated bodies drifting; of what a vial of biotoxins did to a shipment of transplant organs—and the ship’s crew. The usual kind of thing.

  Focus on Lady Elnear, her work for the FTA, work that Centauri didn’t like much, that a lot of combines didn’t like even more. She had a rival for the opening on the Security Council, one with heavy combine support. A lot of networks would do anything to plug him into that slot in her place. Anything they could get away with. One murder was nothing.…

  The whole transfer took less than a minute: Centauri’s self-serving picture puzzle of who would want to kill Lady Elnear, in about a hundred jagged bits. It was going to take my brain a day or so to put them together so that I understood the details completely … but already I could sense the missing pieces. I didn’t ask about them—not yet.

  I took off the headset, and started to lay it down.

  “Keep it,” Braedee said. “Replay it as often as you need to, until you know everything on it.”

  “I already do,” I said. Most people couldn’t retain that much data that fast; they’d need to replay it over and over as it settled in.

  “You really remember everything?” he asked. There was curiosity as much as challenge in it. “That easily?”

  It was my turn to smile, for once.

  He took the headset, and didn’t ask again. “You’ll find more acceptable clothing in your cabin. Put it on when you get back there. And use this on your hair—” He tossed a tube of something at me. “Give it some shape. Nobody wears their hair like that.”

  I glanced at my reflection again, and back at him. If he had any hair at all, I couldn’t tell. I raised my eyebrows.

  “It’s my business to know what’s expected. You’ll have enough trouble not violating sensibilities every time you open your mouth. Try to keep it shut.”

  I picked up the tube and pushed to my feet.

  “Not yet,” he said, waiting just long enough to make me feel awkward. He held up a thin strip of transparent plastic, covered with maybe a dozen colored dots. “We aren’t finished yet. About these.…” The drugs.

  I sat back down, suddenly feeling lightheaded. One hand caught hold of the other, squeezed it too tight, like lost children under the table’s edge. Those very expensive little skin patches would give me back the Gift … make me whole again. Let me touch another mind, warm myself at its fire without the cost, the sickening echoes of somebody else’s deathpain that blinded me every time I tried to make contact—that made me stay out in the cold and the darkness, always remembering.… Except the pain would still be there. Just numbed. Nothing was really free.

  I was half Hydran, and I’d killed a man. If I’d been all Hydran it would have killed me too; the psychological feedback mechanism was built into Hydran brain circuitry along with the psionic abilities that made it necessary. If you could kill with a thought, there had to be something to stop you. Humans didn’t have the psionic ability, or the safeguards either. That was why the Hydrans hadn’t stood a chance against them. I was half human, with half the ability of a real Hydran, and half the safeguards. The feedback hadn’t killed me, but it had crippled me real bad. Time was the only thing that could heal me: fresh bandages of clean memory, safe experiences grafted on like layers of new skin. There hadn’t been enough of either yet.

  With the right drugs acting on exactly the right areas in my brain, I could use my telepathy and not hear warning bells. But it was like I’d told Braedee: sooner or later I’d start to pay for it, doing more damage, until maybe it crippled me for good. But what kind of choice did I have? I needed the money.

  And I needed to feel that fire. I felt a flush start to crawl up my face, saliva filling my mouth, my palms sweating.

  “You have all the physiological responses of an addict,” Braedee said. “Does it really mean that much to you?”

  “Deadhead,” I whispered, “you can’t imagine.” I reached out for the sheet of patches.

  He held it back. “What about the side effects you mentioned—‘like walking on broken legs,’ you said.”

  “That doesn’t matter. I’ll worry about it later.… I’ll do whatever you want. Just give me the drugs.” I stretched out my hand.

  “When we arrive,” he said, beginning to frown.

  “Now. I need some time to work on it, get my control back.… Come on.” My hand fisted.

  He hesitated, staring at me
, reading responses. Doubt, calculation, mockery—all of them could have been on his face, or none. I couldn’t read him. Finally he put the sheet of patches down where I could reach it. I snatched it up, staring at it.

  “Keep them out of sight—especially when you’re using. They last for one standard Earth day. I’ll have more, when you need them.”

  I nodded, not really listening.

  “If you need targets, use Jardan and my aides. Don’t tell them.” He hesitated. “If you ever try to read me, I’ll know it. And I’ll kill you.”

  I looked up, then. I stood up again without saying anything, and left the lab. Before I’d gotten halfway back along the hall, there was a patch behind my ear.

  THREE

  THERE WAS SOMETHING about coming to Earth … it was coming home. It didn’t matter that Earth had stopped being the center of the Federation centuries ago, that it was a backwater, stagnant world, a living museum; that the only reason the Federation Assembly still met here was tradition. It didn’t make any difference that Ardattee, where I’d spent my whole life, was the Hub and the Heart now, where everything that really mattered happened first.… Or that I was too Hydran to feel really human, and too human to ever really be Hydran. It went deeper than that, below the scars and the memories and time itself, catching me by surprise right in the gut.

  It kept me silent and wide-eyed as we left the Centauri Transport field complex. The entire planet had been a Federal Trade District for a couple of centuries, under the direct control of the FTA; it was peppered with starports because of the tourists. But most of the heavy shipping and distribution activity still centered on a place called N’yuk, and so the major transport combines had been granted footholds there. The Federation Assembly met in N’yuk, on neutral ground, inside a sprawling plex that also held the FTA’s Security Council and headquartered all its activities. I’d spent five carefully monitored minutes of access time on Braedee’s ship studying up on it.

  N’yuk was on the coast of a major continent, just like Quarro, where I’d grown up, but it was centered on a handful of islands instead of a peninsula. The prime starport, and the Centauri complex, took up the largest island, Longeye. Triple Gee was based on another island called Stat. Combine embassies sprouted on the mainland like crystal growths, fantasy fortresses, for kilometers along what had once been one of the most polluted stretches on the face of the planet. Like everything else, the pollution was still there, just different. It was data pollution, now.