The Art of Acceptance

By Eric Brown

I curled in the window and watched the crowds promenade down the lighted boulevard. It was spring again in Gay Paree and the streets were thronged with young lovers, poets and artists—my least favourite time of year.

Dan sat lotus on the battered, legless chesterfield. Leads fell from the lumbar-socket under his shirt, and a bootleg tantric-tape zipped ersatz kundalini up his spinal column. He’d told me to go home at midnight, but I liked being around him, and anyway I had to be on hand in case the fountain of pleasure hit jackpot and blew the chakra in his cerebellum. I’d told him he was playing Tibetan roulette with his meatball—bootleg tapes had scoured the skulls of many a novice—but Dan just laughed and said he was doing it all for me. Which he was, in a way, but I still didn’t like it.

When I got bored I tidied the office, stacked Zen vids, cleared away tankas and Confucian self-improving tracts. Then I wrote mahayanan aphorisms backwards on his forehead, the only part of his face free from beard and hair, and inscribed his arms and palms with that old number, “He who has everything has little, he who has nothing has much,” just to show him what I thought of all this transcendental malarky.

I was getting bored again when the building began to shake and flakes of paint snowed from the ceiling. The clanking downchute signalled the approach of a customer.

I yanked the jack from his socket and winced in anticipation of his wrath. He jerked once at the disconnection, then slumped. “Shit, Phuong-”

“Visitor,” I said. I prised open his eye and peered in like a horse-doctor. “Jesus, you look wrecked.”

He was all hair, blood-shot eyes and bad temper. I pulled him to the desk and sat him in the swivel chair, combing my fingers through his curls and arranging the collar of his sweat-soaked khaki shirt. The adage on his brow accused me, but there was no time to remove it. Footsteps sounded along the corridor. “Pull yourself together, Dan. We need the cash.”

I switched on the desk-lamp, made sure my cheongsam was buttoned all the way up, and sat in the shadows beside the door.

She strode in without knocking. I like style—being possessed of none of it myself—and everything, from her entry to the way she crossed her legs and lighted a cigarillo, whispered sophistication.

“Leferve?” she enquired, blowing smoke.

“How can I be of service?” It was his usual line. I was pleased to see that her elegance left him unaffected; he was doing his best to disdain all things physical.

Even so, we needed this commission.

The woman re-lighted her cigarillo and fanned the offending smoke. It crossed my mind that all this was an act.

She was white, but throwback African genes gave her face the exaggerated length and beauty of the Masai. The lasered perfection of her features was familiar, too. I was sure, then, that I’d seen her somewhere before.

“You charge by the hour?”

“Five hundred dollars per.”

She nodded. If she was aware of the ridiculous scrawl on his forehead she didn’t lose her cool and show surprise. She wore a silver lamé mackintosh, belted at the waist, and when she leaned forward to deposit ash in the tray on the desk with a single tap of a long-nailed finger, the lapels buckled outwards to reveal tanned chest and the white sickle scars of a double mastectomy, the latest thing in body fashion.

“I want to hire you for one hour, for which I will pay you twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“I’m not an assassin,” Dan said.

“I assure you that I want no-one killed.”

“Then what do you want?” He reached out to the chessboard on the desk and pushed white Bishop to Queen’s four: follow her.

“That was a rash move, Leferve.” She advanced a pawn, and smiled.

Dan toppled his king. “Now, perhaps you could supply me with a few details. Who are you, and what kind of work do you have in mind?”

She glanced around the office. “This is hardly the place to do business. Perhaps we can discuss these points later, over lunch.”

Below the level of the desk, Dan gestured for me to go. He saw the writing on his arm and, instead of showing anger, he smiled to himself at this childish exhibition of my affection and concern.

I slipped from the office without the woman noticing me.

* * * *

I took the downchute to the boulevard, ran through the rain and rode up the outside of the opposite towerpile to the flier rank. I found Claude and slipped in beside him. Claude had been an ex-spacer with the Satori Line, and in his retirement he piloted a taxi-flier part-time. He sat back in the seat with his fingers laced behind his bulky occipital computer. “Action, Phuong?”

“When it shifts, follow that flier.”

I pointed across the gap to the landing stage. The woman’s flier was an ugly Soviet Zil, two tons of armoured, bullet-proof tank. No wonder the building had quaked when she landed. A uniformed chauffeur stood on the edge of the building and stared out at the lighted night.

Three minutes later the woman emerged and strode across the landing stage. The chauffeur hurried to open the door and the woman slipped quickly inside.

The Zil fired its ‘aft jets, and I experienced the sudden pang of physical pain and mental torture that always hit me whenever I forgot to close my eyes. Even the sound of burners filled me with nausea.

I was fifteen when I took a short cut through a rank of fliers and the sudden ignition of twin Mitsubishi 500s roasted me alive. Only the skill of the surgeons and my parents’ life-savings had saved my life and financed the reconstruction of my face so that it was as pretty as the rest of my body was hideous. I’d been rushing to meet a young Arab I thought I loved. He’d dropped me not long after.

The Zil lifted ponderously and inched out over the boulevard. The jets fired again and it banked with sudden speed into an air-lane, heading north.

“Easy does it, Claude.”

He flipped switches and growled to his on-board computer, and we lifted. He steered barefoot and I was forced into the cushioned seat as we accelerated in pursuit.

Traffic was light, which had its advantages: although we had to keep our distance to remain inconspicuous, the Zil was easy to trace in the empty Paris sky. Lights spangled the city far below, but against the darkened dome our quarry’s burners glowed red like devils’ eyes.

Three minutes later the flier swooped from the air-lane and banked around the silvered bends of the Seine. Claude touched my hand and pointed to one o’clock. A small air-car flew alongside the Zil in a parallel lane. “Been following her since we took off,” he told me.

The Zil decelerated and went down behind the high iron railings of a riverside mansion. “Passy,” Claude commented. “Expensive. What now?”

The one-man flier, having followed the woman to base, banked and fired off across Paris.

“Move in, Claude. And when you’ve dropped me, follow that flier. I want everything you can get on it, okay?”

The mansion was a large square building as old as the revolution. Antiquity, though, was not its most notable feature. Even from a distance of five hundred metres I recognised the colony world flora that was fast becoming the latest sensation with the hopelessly rich.

“Now cut the jets and take us in low. I’m going to jump.”

“Phuong-”

“Do as I say!”

He curled his lips and cut the flier across the corner of the extensive grounds at a height of ten metres. I swung the door open, picked my spot and jumped.

I landed bullseye in a fungoid growth like a giant marshmallow. I bounced, rolled to the edge and fell from a height of a couple of metres, landing on my backside and jarring my spine.

I was in a xeno-biological jungle. Through a lattice of vines and lianas I made out the lighted windows of the mansion. I picked myself up and began hacking a path through the alien salad. It was hard to imagine that I was on the banks of the Seine. I might have been an intrepid explorer trekking through the sweltering tropics of Delta Pavonis IV.

Then I came to the lawn before the mansion and saw the smallship, sitting inside a red-and-white striped, open-ended marquee. The ship was a rusty, ex-Indian cargo ferry, a vintage antique at home in the alien environment of the garden. I recognised its type from the days of my childhood, when I’d skipped college and spent hours at the Orly spaceport; the reversed swastikas and hooked Hindi script brought back a flood of memories. I knew the structural schematics of the ferry inside out, and I was tempted to fulfil an old ambition by boarding the ship through the dorsal escape chute.

Instead I sprinted across the lawn to a long verandah and climbed aboard. I crept along the wall of the mansion, came to a lighted window and peered inside. The room was empty. I moved along to the next window and found the woman.

She stood with her back against the far wall, holding a drink in a long-stemmed glass. She’d changed her mac for a gown, cut low to reveal the scars of her fashionable mutilation. It struck me as sacrilege, like the desecration of a work of art.

She was discussing the merits of various restaurants with someone on a vidscreen. I sat with my back against the brickwork and listened in for perhaps ten minutes, at the end of which I was none the wiser as to the identity of the woman—though I did know which restaurants to patronise next time I had five hundred dollars to blow.

I was thinking about quitting the scene when I noticed movement to my right. I looked up in time to see the shape of the uniformed chauffeur. I jumped up and ran, but he hit me with a neural incapacitator and I jerked once and blacked out.

When I came to my senses I found myself staring at a moving strip of parquet tiling, and felt a strong arm encircling my waist. The chauffeur’s jackboots marched at the periphery of my vision and I realised I was being carried through the mansion.

I put up a feeble struggle, kicked out and yelled at him to put me down. We came to a large polished door and he used my head to push it open, then marched in with me under his arm like a prize.

“And... what have we got here?” the woman exclaimed.

“I found her on the verandah.”

He stood me upright and gripped my elbow, and I played the idiot. I babbled in Kampuchean and made as if stuffing an invisible club sandwich into my mouth with both hands.

The woman glanced at the chauffeur. “I do believe the girl is hungry.”

I nodded. “Bouffe, merci, mademoiselle!”

Then I saw the pix on the wall behind her.

There were perhaps a hundred of them, all depicting the same woman, close-ups and stills from old films and others of her accepting awards—small, golden figures with bald heads—framed and displayed in a monomaniacal exhibition of vanity. I thought I recognised the woman in those shots, though the face was subtly different, the planes of her cheeks altered by cosmetics to conform to some bygone ideal of beauty. Also—but this was ridiculous—the woman on the wall seemed older than the woman who stood before me.

She saw the scars on my neck that the collar failed to hide. She reached out, and I pulled my head away. Her lips described a moue, as if to calm a frightened animal, and she unfastened the top three buttons of my cheongsam.

She stared at me. I felt the weight of pity in her eyes that I came to understand only later—at the time I hated her for it. The usual reaction to my injuries was horror or derision, and I could handle that. But pity was rare, and I could not take pity from someone so beautiful.

She said in a whisper, “Take her away.” And, before I could dive at her, the chauffeur dragged me from the silent room and frog-marched me through the mansion. I was holding back my tears as we hurried outside and through the grounds. He opened a pair of wrought iron gates, pushed me to the sidewalk and kicked me in the midriff. I gasped for breath and closed my eyes as his footsteps receded and the gate squeaked shut. Then, painfully, I pulled myself to my feet, fumbled with the buttons at my chest and limped back to the main drag.

I knew the woman. I’d seen her many, many times before.

That same face...

Her poise, the way she had of making her every movement a unique performance.

Stephanie Etteridge.

But that was impossible, of course.

* * * *

Dan was out when I got back. I left the lights off, swung the Batan II terminal from the ceiling and dialled the catalogue of classic Etteridge movies. I sent out for a meal, sat back in the flickering luminescence of the screen and tried not to feel sorry for myself.

For the next hour I ate dim sum and noodles and stared at a soporific succession of dated entertainments. Even in the better films the acting was stylised, the form limited. At the end of every scene I found myself reaching for the participation-bar on the keyboard, only to be flashed the message that I was watching a pre-modern film and that viewer participation was impossible. So I sat back and fumed and watched the storyline go its unalterable way, like a familiar nightmare.

There was no doubting that, despite the limitations of the form, Stephanie Etteridge had something special. If I could suspend comparison between her movies and the holographic, computerised participation dramas of today, I had to admit that Etteridge had a certain star quality, a charismatic presence.

When I’d seen enough, I returned to the main menu and called up The Life of Stephanie Etteridge, a eulogistic documentary made only two years ago.

It was the usual life of a movie star; there was the regular quota of marriages and affairs, drug addictions and suicide attempts; low points when her performances were below standard and the fickle public switched allegiance for a time to some parvenu starlet with good looks and better publicity—and high points when she fought back from slash addiction, the death of a husband and universal unpopularity to carry off three successive Oscars in films the critics came to hail as classics.

And then the final tragedy.

The film industry died a death. In Geneva, a cartel of computer-wizards developed Inter-Active computer-simulated holographies, and actors, directors, scriptwriters were a thing of the past, superseded by the all-powerful Programmer. In one month the studios in Hollywood, Bombay, Rio and Sydney shut up shop and the stars found themselves redundant. A dozen or so mega-stars were paid retainers so that their personas could be used to give Joe Public familiar, reassuring faces to see them through the period of transition—until a whole new pantheon of computer-generated screen Gods was invented for mass worship. Etteridge was one of these tide-over stars, which was how I recognised her face; I’d seen many ‘Etteridge’ Inter-Active dramas as a kid. But it didn’t take a degree in psychology to read between the lines of the documentary and realise that lending your face to a virtual character was no compensation for the denial of real stardom.

The documentary didn’t dwell on the personal tragedy, of course; the last scene showed her marriage to an Italian surgeon, and while the credits rolled a voice-over reported that Stephanie Etteridge had made her last film in ten years ago and thereafter retired to a secluded villa in the South of France.

I was re-running that last film when Dan came back.

He’d washed and changed; he wore a smart, side-fastening blue suit with a high collar. I preferred him in casuals—but perhaps that was because I knew where he was going.

“You dining with that woman, Dan?” I asked.

He nodded. “The Gastrodome at twelve.”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” I whispered, and I was unable to tell whether I was jealous, or scared at what the woman might want Dan to do.

“Like you said earlier, we need the dollars.” He mussed my hair. “Did you find out who she is?”

I told him that I’d followed her to a mansion on the left bank, but I said nothing about my capture.

“There were tons of blown-up stills on the walls,” I said, “all of the old film actress Stephanie Etteridge. I know you’re going to call me dumb, but the resemblance is remarkable. Not only her face, but the way she moves. Look...”

I turned the screen to him while Etteridge played the spurned lover with a bravura performance of venom and spite. “Recognise?”

He leaned close and whispered in my ear. “You’re dumb.”

“I know, I know. But you must admit, the resemblance...”

Dan nodded. “Okay, the woman does look like Etteridge. But that film’s what...? Thirty years old? I’d say that Etteridge was about forty there. That’d make her seventy now... Are you trying to tell me that the woman we saw here today was that old?”

“But why all the pictures?”

He shrugged. “Beats me. Perhaps she’s the daughter of the actress. Or a fan. Or some fruit-cake who thinks she’s Etteridge. Have you accessed her? A hundred to one you’ll find her dead.”

So I turned back to the Batan and called up the information on Stephanie Katerina Etteridge. We scanned her life story in cold, documentary fact. Date of birth, education, professional status, the four marriages, her involvement with an American businessman jailed for an unspecified misdemeanour a matter of days before they were due to marry—though the documentary had said nothing about this. And her death...?

I threw the nearest thing to hand—a tape cartridge—at Dan. “You owe me!”

He fielded the cartridge and waved it. “Okay, so she’s still alive—a crotchety old dame somewhere living on caviar and memories. She’s over seventy, Phuong.”

I turned away in a huff.

Dan readied the tape on the desk. He slipped a small mic into his pocket so that I’d be able to monitor his conversation with the woman over dinner.

“Catch you later.”

I came out of my sulk. “Dan, take care. Okay?”

I ran to the door and tried to pull him to me, but he stiffened and kissed the top of my head as if I were a kid. Despite all the Zen he’d been pumping into his skull, he still could not accept me. From needing to show affection, my feelings polarised and I wanted suddenly to hit him, to hurt him as much as he hurt me. He murmured goodbye and took the downchute to the boulevard.

* * * *

Two years ago Dan had been an Engineman with the Canterbury Line, a spacer who mind-pushed bigships through the nada-continuum. Then the Keilor-Vincicoff Organisation developed the interfaces, and the bigships Lines went out of business, leaving thousands of Engineman and -women strung out and in need of the flux. Denied union with the bliss of the nada-continuum, Dan drank too much and got into Buddhism and to feed himself started a third rate investigative Agency based in Bondy. He advertised for an assistant to do the leg-work, and I got the job.

We got along fine for weeks, even though I was evasive and distant and didn’t let him get too close. Then as I got to know him better I began to believe that we were both disabled, and that if I could accept the state of his head, then perhaps he could come to some acceptance of my body.

Then one night he asked me back to his place, and like a fool I nodded yes. The usual scene, as far as I could gather from the films I’d watched: soft light, music, wine... And after a bottle of chianti I found myself close to him. His fingers mimed the shape of my face, centimetres away; it was as if he had difficulty believing my beauty and was afraid to let his fingertips discover a lie. But it was no lie, just reconstructed osseous underlay and synthi-flesh done with the touch of an artist. We kissed. He fumbled my buttons and I went for his zip, meaning to get him with my mouth before he discovered my secret. I didn’t make it. He touched me where my right breast should have been, then ripped open my bodice. He gagged and tipped me to the floor, strode to the window and stared out while I gathered my stuff and ran.

I stayed away for weeks, until he came for me and apologised. I returned to the office and we began again from the beginning, and it was as if we were closer, having shared our secrets—though never, of course, close enough.

* * * *

Soon after that night at his place he began experimenting. He claimed that he was doing it for me. By embracing illegal skull-tapes, second-hand Buddhism and the Bardo Thodol rewritten for the modern era, he said he was attempting to come to some acceptance of my disfigurement—but I knew he was also doing it for himself.

Now I stared at the mystical junk that littered the desk and the chesterfield: the pamphlets, the mandalas, the meditation pins and bootleg tapes. In a rage I picked up a great drift of the stuff and threw it the length of the room. When the desk and chesterfield were cleared, and my anger was still not exhausted, I ran across the office, fell to my knees and pitched tankas and pins, magazines and effigies of Gautama through the window. I leaned out and laughed like a fool, then rushed down into the street and stomped on the useless relics and idols of mysticism, ground them into the sidewalk and kicked the debris into the storm drain. Then, as the rain poured down around me, I sat on the kerb and cried.

Hell, real love rarely lasted; so what chance had our corrupted version of attraction, what chance had the relationship between a screwed up Engineman attempting to rewire his head with bogus Buddhist tracts so that he could, in theory, ignore the physical, and someone whose body was no more than a puckered mass of raddled meat? It was unfair to both of us; it was unfair of myself to expect love and affection after so many years without hope, and it was unfair of me to keep Dan from other women who could offer him more than just companionship and a pretty face.

* * * *

The tape was running when I returned to the office.

I lay on the chesterfield in the darkness and listened to the clink of glasses, the murmur of polite conversation. The Gastrodome was the de-commissioned astrodome of an old French bigship, amputated and welded atop the Eiffel tower. I’d been up there once, but the view, had given me vertigo. Now I lay half asleep and listened to the dialogue that filled the room.

All I wanted was for Dan to refuse to work for the woman, so that he would be free from the danger of whatever it was she wanted him to do. Then, when he returned, I could tell him that I was leaving, and that this time there was nothing he could say to make me return.

“Tell me about when you worked for the Canterbury Line,” the woman said. “Is it true that in flux you experience Nirvana?”

“Some Enginemen claim that.”

“Did you?”

“Do we have to talk about this?” he said, and I knew that his hands would be trembling.

In my mind’s eye I could see the woman giving an unconcerned shrug. “Very well, but I hope you don’t mind discussing your occipital implant-”

Dan, “Why?” suspicious.

“Because I’m interested.” Her tone was hard. “What kind is it, Leferve?”

“Standard Sony neo-cortical implant-”

“With a dozen chips in the pre-frontal lobe, subcortex, cerebellum, etc...?”

“You’ve done your homework,” Dan said. “Why the interest?”

“When was the last time you fluxed?”

I cried out.

It took Dan aback, too. The silence stretched. Then: “Almost two years ago...”

“Would you consider doing it just one more time,” she asked, “for twenty-five thousand dollars?”

I balled my fists and willed him to say no...

“I have a smallship I need taking on a short haul,” she said.

There was a brief moment of silence, then Dan spoke.

“Insystem or interstellar?”

And I yelled, “Dan...”

“Neither,” the woman said. “I want you to push the ship through the nada-continuum from here to Frankfurt.”

Dan laughed. “You’re mad...”

“I’m quite sane, I assure you. From A to B and back again. You’ll be in the flux-tank for less than one hour.”

“And the ship?”

“An ex-Indian Navy Hindustan-Tata with Rolls-Royce ion drive-”

“Crew?”

“None. Just you and me. The ship is pre-programmed with the co-ordinates. All it needs is someone to push it.”

“And I’d be wasting my time asking what all this is about?”

The woman assented. “You’d be wasting your time. Can I take it that you want the job?”

Dan murmured something.

“Good,” she said. “Here’s my card. If you arrive at five, we’ll phase out at six.”

They left the restaurant and took the downchute to the landing stage. I sat in the darkness and stared at the wall, wishing that Dan had had the strength of will to turn his back on the flux. He craved union with the nada-continuum, but this gig would be just a quick fix after which his craving would be all the more intense.

I switched off the tape, then switched it on again. I couldn’t face Dan and tell him that I was leaving—that way I’d end up screaming and shouting how much I hated him, which wasn’t true. I’d leave a message to the effect that I needed a long break, and quit before he got back. I picked up the microphone.

Then the Batan chimed and Claude’s big face filled the screen. “Phuong, I got the information on that flier.”

“Yeah?” My thoughts were elsewhere.

“Belongs to a guy called Lassolini—Sam Lassolini.”

I just shrugged.

Claude went on, “He’s a surgeon, a big noise in European bio-engineering.”

I remembered the documentary, and Etteridge’s last marriage. “Hey, wasn’t he married to-”

Claude nodded. “That’s the guy. He hit the headlines a few years ago when the film star Stephanie Etteridge left him.”

“You got his address, Claude?”

“Sure. De Gaul building, Montparnasse.”

“Pick me up in five minutes.”

I thought about it.

Now why would Sam Lassolini follow the Stephanie Etteridge look-alike to her mansion in Passy...?

There was only one way to find out.

* * * *

The de Gaul building was the old city morgue, deserted and derelict but for the converted top floor, now a penthouse suite. Claude dropped me on the landing stage and I told him to wait. I took the downchute one floor and hiked along a corridor. I came to a pair of double doors and hit the chime. I felt suddenly conspicuous. I hadn’t washed for two days, and I’d hardly had time to learn my lines.

A small Japanese butler opened the door.

“Lassolini residence?” I asked.

“The doctor sees no-one without an appointment.”

“Then I’ll make an appointment—for now.”

I tried to push past him. When he barred my way I. showed him my pistol and said that if he didn’t sit down and keep quiet I’d blow a hole in his head. He sat down quickly, hands in the air.

I tiptoed down a passage and came to a vast ballroom with a chequerboard floor of marble and onyx tiles, and a dozen scintilating chandeliers. There was no sign of Lassolini; I would have called out, but the weight of the silence intimidated me.

I opened the first door on the right.

It took me about fifteen seconds to recognise the woman who this morning had visited the office, who I had followed to the mansion, and who, less than thirty minutes ago, had been dining with Dan.

She was hanging by the neck and her torso had been opened with something sharp from sternum to stomach; the contents of her abdomen had spilled, and the weight of her entrails anchored her to the floor.

I heard a sound behind me and turned. A tall, Latin guy looked down on me. He wore a white suit and too much gold. I did mental arithmetic and decided that he looked good for sixty.

“Sam Lassolini?” I asked.

He didn’t deny it. “Who are you, and what do you want?”

I drew my pistol and aimed at his chest. Next to it I hung my identification. “Phuong Li Xian,” I said.

“I have the power of arrest.” I indicated the woman. “Why did you do it, Lassolini?”

He looked past me at the body and smiled. “If I may answer a question with a question: why your interest?”

I hesitated. “I’m working on her case.”

He threw his head back and laughed.

My fist tightened on the pistol. “I don’t see what’s so funny.”

He indicated another, door along the hall. “Follow me.”

He opened the door and entered the room. He turned to face me, his laughter mocking my shock.

Behind him, spread across the floor and the far wall, were the remains of what once might have been a human being. It was as if the wall and the floor had suddenly snapped shut to create a grotesque Rorschach blot of flesh and blood. The only part of the body that had survived the mutilation was the head. It sat beside Lassolini’s right foot, staring at me.

It was the head of the same woman...

Lassolini left the room and strode to the next door. He paused on the threshold. “My dear...” I stumbled after him, amenable with shock.

Another atrocity. This time the woman had been lasered into bloody chunks and arranged on plinths around the room after the fashion of Dali.

“You’re mad!” I cried.

“That did occur to me, my dear. Though what you see here is not the cause or symptom of it, but an attempt to cure myself. A catharsis, if you like.”

“But... but which one is Stephanie Etteridge?”

“None of them is Stephanie,” he said. “She is alive and well and living in Paris. And yet... all of them were Stephanie.”

I took control of my shock, levelled the pistol and said with determination: “Look, Lassolini, I want answers. And if I don’t get them...”

He bowed. “Very well, my dear. This way—and I assure you, no more horrors.”

He strode down a long corridor. I had to run to keep up. We came to a pair of swing doors with circular portholes, and Lassolini pushed through. Another surprise: after the luxury of the ballroom, the stark and antiseptic utility of what looked like a hospital ward. Then I remembered that this place was once the city morgue.

We stopped at a line of horizontal silver tanks, and with an outstretched hand Lassolini invited me to inspect their contents.

I peered through the first frosted faceplate and made out the young, beautiful face of Stephanie Etteridge. In a daze I moved on to the next one, and the next: Etteridge, again, and again. Each tank contained a flawless replica of the actress.

I stared at him, and he smiled.

“Clones...” I murmured, and I experienced a curious vacuum within my chest.

“Perspicacious of you, my dear.”

“But I thought the science was still in its experimental stages. I thought the Kilimanjiro Corporation had the rights...”

Lassolini laughed. “The science is still in its experimental stages,” he said. “And I am the Kilimanjiro Corporation.”

I gestured in the direction of the ritually slaughtered Etteridge clones. “But you still murdered human beings,” I said. “Even clones are-”

Lassolini was shaking his head. “By no stretch of the imagination can they be considered human—as of yet. They are grown from DNA samples taken from the original Stephanie Etteridge, and their minds remain blank until the encoded identity of the subject is downloaded into them.”

“So those...?”

“Merely so much dead meat. But it pleased me to sacrifice Stephanie, if only in effigy. These bodies were the ones I kept in supply for the time when she aged and required her youth again.”

I looked into his youthful face. “So both you, and the Stephanie Etteridge I met, are clones?” I was beginning to understand.

He regarded me, as if calculating how much to divulge.

“We were married for five happy years,” he said. “When her career came to an end, and she began to show signs of age, I promised her a new lease of life. Virtual immortality. Perhaps only this kept her with me, until my scientists perfected the technique of cloning, and the more difficult procedure of recording and downloading individual identity from one brain to another.

“She was nearly seventy when we downloaded her into the body of her twenty year old clone. Then... and then she left me, and nothing I could do or say would make her return. I had such plans! We could have toured the Expansion together in eternal youth.” He seemed to deflate at the recollection of her betrayal.

“I considered hiring an assassin to kill the man she left me for, but as events transpired that proved unnecessary. She divorced me, and a matter of days before she was due to marry her lover he was arrested by the German police and charged with conspiring to sabotage a European military satellite. He was jailed for life.”

He paused there and licked his lips. When he spoke next it was in barely a whisper. “You mentioned that you were on her ‘case’ ?”

“That’s right.”

“Then... you’re in contact with her?”

I was guarded. “I might be.”

“Then bring her to me!” And I was shocked by the intensity of his emotion.

I glanced at the Etteridge clones, then back at the surgeon who had performed this miracle.

“I have a price,” I said.

“Name it!”

With trembling fingers I fumbled with the buttons of my cheongsam and revealed my body.

* * * *

Claude was snoozing in his flier when I jumped aboard and yelled at him to take off. I checked my watch. It was five-forty, and Etteridge and Dan were due to phase-out at six. We burned across Paris towards Passy.

Ten minutes later we sailed in over the Seine. Claude slowed and we cut across the corner of the Etteridge estate. I opened the hatch and prepared to jump. “See you later, Claude.”

His reply was lost as I dived.

This time I missed the marshmallow and fell through a bush with leaves like sabres. I picked myself up, bleeding from a dozen cuts, and limped through the jungle. It was three minutes to six when I emerged from the trees, and the smallship was still berthed inside the marquee. I ducked back into the vegetation and ran along the side of the tent. Once behind it I left the cover and dodged guy ropes.

I lifted the tarpaulin wall of the tent, squirmed through the gap and ran over to the dorsal escape chute. I palmed the sensor and waited for the hatch to cycle—ten seconds, though it seemed like as many minutes. I checked my watch: one minute to go. Then the hatch slid open and I jumped inside and curled in the darkness. Above me, the computerised locking system of the interior hatch rumbled away to itself and finally opened. I pulled myself into the carpeted, semi-lighted corridor. And I’d realised a childhood ambition: I was inside a smallship.

I could see along the corridor and into the bridge. Etteridge sat in a swivel-seat between the arms of a V-shaped instrument console, speaking to a soft-voiced computer. Beside her was the sen-dep tank, the hatch dogged and the alpha-numerics pulsing a countdown sequence. Dan was already in there.

I drew my pistol and started towards the bridge. If I could untank Dan before he fluxed-

Seconds later the ‘ship phased into the nada-continuum.

The ‘ship pitched, knocking me off my feet. I fell against a bulkhead, striking my head. I was out for only a matter of minutes, and when I came to my senses we were no longer flying through the nada-continuum.

I stared through the forward viewscreen and made out the concrete expanse of a penitentiary exercise yard. We were there for less than ten seconds. I heard the hatch wheeze open, and Stephanie’s cries as a prisoner ran towards the ship and scrambled aboard. Laser bolts ricocheted from the concrete and hissed across the skin of the ‘ship. Then the hatch slammed shut the ‘ship slipped again from this reality.

I giggled like a lunatic. If only my younger self, the kid who’d haunted the Orly star terminal just to get a glimpse of phasing starships, could see me now: stowaway on the craziest jailbreak of all time.

Three minutes became as many hours; time elasticated—then snapped back to normal as we re-emerged in the real world of the red-and-white striped marquee on the lawn of the riverbank mansion.

Through the viewscreen I could see Claude, waiting for me in his flier.

I ran.

The Etteridge clone and the escapee were in each others’ arms when I reached the bridge; they had time to look round and register surprise and shock before I raised my pistol and fired, sending them sprawling stunned across the deck.

I stood over the woman, smiling at the future she represented...

When I delivered Stephanie Etteridge, Lassolini would take from me the DNA which in four years, when cloned, would be a fully grown nineteen year-old replica of myself—with the difference that whereas now my body was a ninety percent mass of slurred flesh-and scars, my new cloned body would be pristine, unflawed, and maybe even beautiful.

While Etteridge and her lover twitched on the deck, their motor neurone systems in temporary dysfunction, I untanked Dan. I hauled out the slide-bed, pulled the jacks from his occipital implant and helped him upright.

Of course, Lassolini had said nothing about what he intended to do with his ex-wife—and at the time I had hardly considered it, my mind full of the thought that in four years I would be whole again, an attractive human being, and the shame and regret would be a thing of the past.

Now I thought of Stephanie Etteridge in the clutches of Lassolini. I imagined her dismembered corpse providing the sick surgeon with his final cathartic tableau, a sadistic arrangement of her parts exhibited beneath the chandeliers of the ballroom in the ultimate act of revenge.

Etteridge crawled across the deck to the man she had saved. She clung to him, and all I could do was stare as the tears coursed down my cheeks.

What some people will do for love...

* * * *

I pulled Dan away from the tank. He was dazed and physically blitzed from his union with the infinite, his gaze still focused on some ineffable vision granted him in the nada-continuum.

“Phuong...?”

“Come on!” I cried, taking his weight as he stumbled legless across the bridge. I kicked open the hatch and we staggered from the smallship and out of the marquee. I had to be away from there, and fast, before I changed my mind.

Claude helped Dan into the flier. “I thought you said we were taking the woman?” he said.

“I’m leaving her!” I sobbed. “Just let’s get out of here.”

I sat beside Dan on the back seat and closed my eyes as the burners caught and we lifted from the lawn. We banked over the Seine and Dan fell against me,, his body warm and flux-spiced from the tank.

As we sped across Paris, I thought of Etteridge and her lover—and the fact that she would never realise the fate she had been spared. I wished them happiness, and gained a vicarious joy I often experience when considering people more fortunate than myself.

* * * *

I assisted Dan into the darkened office and laid him out on the chesterfield. Then I sat on the edge of the cushion and stared at the tape on the desk, set up two hours ago to record my last farewell.

I picked up the microphone, switched it on and began in a whisper. “I’ve enjoyed working for you, Dan. We’ve had some good times. But I’m getting tired of Paris. I need to see more of the world. They say Brazil’s got a lot going for it. I might even take a look at Luna or Mars. They’re always wanting colonists...” And I stopped there and thought about wiping it and just walking out. Even nothing seemed better than this bland goodbye.

Then Dan cried out and his arm snared my waist. I looked into his eyes and read his need, his fear after his confrontation with the infinite. And something more...

His lips moved in a whisper, and although I was unable to make out the words, I thought I knew what he wanted.

I reached out and wiped the tape, then lay on the chesterfield beside Dan and listened to his breathing and the spring rain falling in the boulevard outside.