The Pineal-Zen Equation

By Eric Brown

I’m dropping acid shorts in the Supernova slouchbar when the call comes through. Gassner stares from the back of my hand, veins corrugating his mugshot. Gassner’s white—fat and etiolated like a monster maggot—but my Bangladeshi metacarpus tans him mulatto. He’s a xenophobic bastard and the fact that he comes over half-caste on the handset never fails to make me smile.

I like irony almost as much as I dislike Gassner.

He’s muttering now, some stuff about young junkies.

“You wrecked?” he queries, peering.

“I’m fine,” I lie.

He wants me in ten. He has customers coming. Distraught parents who have evidence their daughter was butchered. “This is big-time, girl. Some high-up in the Wringsby-Saunders outfit. Don’t screw it.” I feel like telling him to auto-fellate on a cannibal personatape, but I resist the urge. Maybe later, when I have the funds to fly. He still owns me, still has his fat face stamped on the back of my hand, good as any brand.

But it’s only a matter of time now.

I’ve been out for hours. What I did earlier needed a good hit to help me forget. My head’s dead and so are my legs. I stagger through a battlescene of prostrate bodies and make it to the chute.

Outside it’s night, and the crowds are beginning to hit the streets. I brazen my way across a packed sidewalk, earning taunts on three counts. I’m a telepath and a junkie—the two go together—and I have no crowd-sense. I admit everything with an insolent yeah-yeah to whoever’s complaining and climb aboard the moving boulevard. A breeze, fresh onetime but polluted now with city stench, does its best to revive me. I ride the slide a block and alight at 3rd. Feeling better already, I dodge touts and beggars and home in on the Union towerpile.

“Bangladesh!” The legless oldster grins in my direction, dumped like garbage by the entrance. How does he do it? He gouged his eyes out yearsback and still he knows when I’m coming. Could be he’s on to the scent of my hair oil, or even my crotch. His tag’s Old Pete, and he’s my regular. I slip him creds and he makes sure I’m stocked with ‘gum when I see Gassner. “Any nearer?” he asks now.

I try a probe. All I get is jumblefuzz. He’s shielded. We have a game, me and him. He reckons he was someone famous, onetime, and I have to guess who. His face is certainly familiar, disregarding the absent nose and evacuated eye-sockets. He went Buddhist, yearsback. Quit the race and mutilated himself to indicate his repudiation of this illusion. I often wonder what it was that drove him to such extreme action. Maybe he was seeking enlightenment, or perhaps he’d found it. Once again I concede ignorance, pass him ten and chew ‘gum in the upchute.

I’m feeling great when I hit the 33rd. Gassner has his office shelved this level, though ‘office’ is a grand title for his place of work. It’s little more than a cubby filled with Batan II terminals and link-ups and however much of his blubber isn’t spilling through the hatch. I enter bright, my metabolism pumping ersatz adrenalin. It doesn’t do to let him see me any other way. He’d gloat if he knew how low I was at being his slave.

A metal desk-top, the bonnet of a pre-fusion automobile, pins his fat up against the floor-to-ceiling window. He’s scanning case notes and his grunt acknowledges the fact that I got in with about three seconds to spare. The only light in the place is the silver glow from the computer screen. I clamber over this and sit cross-legged in the hammock where Gassner slings his meat between shifts. Every ten seconds the chiaroscuro gloom is relieved from outside by the electric blue sweep of a misaligned photon display, strobing sub-lim flashes of ‘Patel’s Masala Dosa’ into our forebrains.

I slip my ferronniere from its case and loop it around my head. And instantly all the minds in the building, previously mere distant flickering candles, torch painfully. I strain out the extraneous mindmush, editing the occasional burst of brainhowl from psychopathic individuals, and work at keeping my head together.

Gassner, of course, is shielded. It wouldn’t be good policy for someone who employed a telepath to go about with his head open. I’m shut out, persona non grata in his meatball. Times are when I’d love to read my master. Then again, times are when I’m glad I’m barred entry. I read too many screwballs in the course of a day without Gassner opening up.

Seconds later Mr and Mrs distraught roll in.

The guy is Kennedy, and he’s playing it cool. I’ll be lying if I call him distraught; on the Richterscale of personal upheaval he’d hardly register. He’s chewing djamba to calm himself and he carries his bonetoned body with a certain hauteur. Or call it arrogance. Under one arm he has the silver envelope containing the evidence, and under the other his wife. She’s Scandinavian, beautiful in better circumstances, but grief plays havoc with good looks and right now Mrs Kennedy is ugly. I get the impression that Mr Kennedy is embarrassed by the degree of his wife’s distress.

They sit down while Gassner murmurs pleasantries, then jerks a thumb up at me. “Bangladesh,” he says. “My assistant.”

My name’s Sita, but ever since the invasion I got the national tag. Here in the West they reckon it’s kinda cute. I’m just glad I wasn’t born in Bulgaria.

My presence, perched aloft, surprises Mrs Kennedy. She flickers a timid smile, then sees the connected-minds symbol on my cheek. She recoils mentally; she has no wish to have her grief made any more public than she can allow. I think reassurance at her, telling her that I have no intention of prying—at least, not too much. There’s no way I’m probing deep into the angst-ridden maelstrom of her psyche. Grief and regret and self-pity boil down there, and I have my own quota of these emotions to contend with at the best of times.

As for Mr Kennedy... He’s shielded, so I don’t waste sweat trying to probe. And anyway I already know enough about him, everything I want to know, and even things his little Oslo-born third wife doesn’t know.

He nods at me, his gaze coolly observant.

I give him my best wink.

And my presence here is token, now. Gassner questions them and they answer, and I probe Mrs Kennedy to ensure veracity, not that I really need to. I had the facts of the case even before she crossed the threshold.

Becky Kennedy was snatched inside an uptown gymnasium at ten this morning, her bodyguard taken out with a neural-incapacitator. Their assailant came and went so fast that the bodyguard saw nothing. Around noon the Kennedys, waiting anxiously in their suburban ranch, received a silver envelope.

Kennedy glances at Gassner, who nods. He lays the envelope on he desk and amid fresh whimperings from his wife slides out a glossy photograph. I lean forward. It isn’t pretty. The still shows a young girl, spread-eagled in a leotard, with a massive bullet wound in her pubescent chest. Here dead eyes stare at the camera, frozen with terror.

“No note or message of any kind?” Gassner wheezes.

Kennedy replaces the photograph in the envelope. “Nothing. Just this,” he says, and adds, without the slightest hint of appeal in his tone, “Can you get my daughter back, Mr Gassner?”

My boss fingers the folds of fat at his neck. “I’m almost certain we can, Mr Kennedy.”

“Within the three-day limit? She’s due on the Vienna sub-orbital next month. We’d like her to make it.”

And Mrs Kennedy breaks down again. She knows that the majority of missing kids are never found, except after the three-day limit. Despite Gassner’s reassurances, she can’t believe she’ll ever see her little Becky again.

Gassner is saying, “The fact that your daughter’s abductor sent you this photograph indicates to me that what we have here is no ordinary abduction.” By which he means that Becky might not end up as the meat in a necrophilic orgy.

“My guess is that you’ll receive a ransom demand for your daughter pretty soon. My Agency will handle the negotiations. On top of whatever ransom demand is made, my fee for the case is two million creds.”

Kennedy waves. “Just get my daughter back, Mr Gassner. And you’ll get your fee.”

“Excellent. I’m glad to see that someone appreciates how dangerous our line of work can be. We are dealing with criminal psychopaths, Mr Kennedy. No price can fully compensate for the dangers involved.”

But two million creds will do nicely, thanks... Two millions that Gassner needs desperately. Trade is bad nowadays, and Gassner is struggling to keep his fat head above the choppy water-level of Big-City business.

He arranges to keep in touch and the Kennedys quit. I jump down and squat by the hatch, watching them go. “You got everything?” Gassner wheezes.

I nod. “Everything I need.”

Gassner catches my eye as I’m about to leave. “Hey—and if you find the body before they get the ransom demand, you know how to work it, girl.”

I wink, point a blaster made out of fingers to show that I’m on his wavelength—but his instructions worry me. Does he suspect?

“I’m flying, Gassner,” I say.

“Hey, how’s Joe? I haven’t seen him around.”

The bastard sure knows how to land a cruel one. “Joe’s just fine,” I lie. I pray Allah give me strength to make minestrone of his meatball. But what the hell? “Ciao,” I call, blow him a kiss and quit.

* * * *

Drifting...

I was drifting monthsback when I found Joe Gomez. Drifting? It’s a state of mind as well as a physical act. You can’t have one without the other; they’re sort of mutually inter-dependent. To drift, get high on whatever’s-your-kick, fill your head with some sublime and unattainable goal, and hit the night. Ride the moving boulevard a-ways, alongside the safe-city civvies out for the thrill of slumming, and when their mundane minds become just too much, quit the boulevard and try out the mews and alleyways. Drift forever and lose track of time. There’s something for everyone down there; was even something for me.

Back then I was a screwed up, neurotic wreck. My past was a time in my head I tried to forget about, and my present wasn’t so strawberries-and-cream, either. A second-grade telepath indentured to a fifth-rate, one-man investigative Agency. I worked a twelve-hour shift and the work was hard: try probing a mind seething with evil sometime. I had another ten years of this hand-to-mouth, mind-to-mind existence ahead of me, and there were times when I thought I could take no more. If I survived the ten years I could leave the Agency, discard my ferronniere and let my telesense atrophy—but even then I’d always be aware that taken as a race we weren’t up to much... So I had no hopes for the future and the only way I could take the present was to chew my ‘gum and live from day to day. Even so, I neglected myself. I’d go days without eating; I was never fat, but after a stretch of working and drifting and starving- I’d be famine-thin, wasted.

I suppose the drifting helped, though. It was part of the day to day routine. My goal? You’d laugh—but they say if you seek long enough, you’ll find. And I found. My goal was someone.

I had no idea who. I sometimes kid myself I was looking for Joe all along, that I knew he existed out there among the millions and it was just a matter of time before I found him. But that’s just old retrospect, playing tricks. Truth is, I was looking for a good and pure mind to prove to myself that we weren’t all bad, that hope existed.

So I’d get high at the end of a shift, ride the boulevard and slip into the tributaries. On the prowl, drifting...

I was a familiar face down the lighted darktime quarter. I’d be given rat-and-sparrow kebabs by the Chinese food-stall owners who wanted to fatten me up. The touts, they left me alone after the first few weeks when I declined to buy. They hawked everything from themselves to pure slash, from spare parts for illicit surgery to the Goodbye Express itself—Pineal-z. The drug from the third planet of star Aldebaran that’d give you the trip of a lifetime and total you in the process. It freaked me, that hit. Onetime monthsback I was drinking shorts in a seedy slouch and through the wall I probed a jaded businessman who’d had his fill of everything and wanted out. He’d paid a cool half million for the pleasure of ending his life, and he went with an extravaganza. Subjectivewise he lived another eighty years and his pineal bloomed to show him the evolution of his kind. I tripped along with him until he died, then I staggered back to my pad. I was zonked for three days following, and for another week hallucinated Pithecanthropus and Neanderthal Man dancing the light fantastic on the boulevard. Only later did I get vague flashbacks, memories of the vast, impenetrable blackness that swallowed the oldster when the drug blew his head. It frightened me at first, this intangible nothingness I could neither experience nor understand. In time, a month maybe, I managed to push it away somewhere, forget.

Then I was back drifting again, seeking.

I’d black my connected-minds symbol and probe, discarding heads by the thousand one after the other as they each displayed the same flawed formulas. Some heads were better than others, but even the better ones were tainted with greed and selfishness and hate. And then there were the really bad ones, the heads that struck me at a distance with their freight of evil, that stood out in a crowd like cancer cells in lymph gland.

Then there were the shielded minds, in which anything might be lurking.

I found Joe Gomez in a bar called the Yin-Yang.

It’s an underground dive with a street level entrance washed in the flutter of a defective fluorescent. Three figures were standing in the silver sometimes-light that night, and something about them caught my attention. They wore the fashionable greys of rich businessmen, and their minds were shielded. They were discussing something among themselves in a tone which suggested they had no wish to be overheard. And one of the guys had o-o tattooed on his cheek.

Now what the hell were three uptown executives doing whispering outside a slum bar at four o’clock in the morning? As sure as Allah is Allah not transacting business, I reasoned.

But I was wrong. They were.

I got close and listened in on their whispers. At the same time I became aware of an emanation from the subterranean Yin-Yang. The two connected. Casualwise, I slipped past the three execs and, once out of sight, jumped the steps two by two. The emanation was the sweet music of violin over din. My quest was almost over.

But not quite. I had to get him out, first.

The bar was a slouch. Felled junkies littered the various levels of the padded floor. I found the barman and asked him if the place had another entrance, and he indicated west.

Then I looked around and probed.

The guy with the harmonious brainvibes sat against the far wall, drinking beer. He wore the blue one-piece of an off-duty spacer, and I read with surprise that he was an Engineman. He was good-looking too in a dark, Spanish kind of way.

I glanced at the entrance. There was no sign of the executives. They were no doubt still debating whether this was the guy they intended to scrape. Obviously their telepath was a few grades below me; I knew immediately that the spacer was prime material for what they had in mind.

I projected an aura of authority and crossed the slouch. “Joe Gomez?”

He looked up, startled; surprised at being paged by a not-so-good-looking black girl. I realised that the telepath outside would be getting all this, too. So I slipped my shield from my tunic and palmed it onto his coverall. Then I grabbed his arm and blitzed him with a burst of life-or-death urgency.

As we hurried to the far door and up the steps I caught the tantalizing whiff of flux on his body. Then we were outside and swamped in the collective odours of a dozen ethnic fastfoods. “This way.”

I ran him up the alley and under an arch, then down a parallel thruway and up an overpass. Crowds got in the way and we barged through, making good progress. Years of drifting had superimposed a routemap of the quarter on my cortex. The execs would be floundering now, cursing their lost opportunity. I’d grabbed the golden goose and I could hardly believe my luck. To be on the safe side I took him across the boulevard and up a towerpile into a cheap Mexican restaurant I used when I was eating.

Outside, the city extended in a never-ending, jewelled stretch. The million coruscating points of light might have indicated as many foci of evil that night—but we were away from it all up here and I had Joe Gomez. I could hardly control my shaking.

Then it came to me how close he’d been to annihilation, and I broke down. “You stupid, stupid bastard,” I cried.

“Look, Sita—that’s your name, isn’t it?” He was bemused and embarrassed. He’d caught bits of me as I rushed him out, and he knew he owed me. “Who were those guys?”

“Who? Just your funeral directors, is who.” My tears were tears of relief now. “They were pirates in the scrape-tape industry. I overheard them before I got your vibes.”

“So? I could have been a star.”

“Yeah, a dead star, kid. Not many ways you can be killed nowadays, but they would’ve killed you dead.”

His tan disappeared and he looked sick. “But I thought the industry was legal? I’ve seen personatapes on sale in the marts-”

His naivety amazed me. “The personatape side of the thing is legal. They makes tapes of the famous, or how they think the famous might have been. But these pirates make personatapes of real people by squeezing fools like you dry. You’re so good you gave me raptures, and they wanted that.” And I was already wanting to snatch my shield away from him, wanting more...

He stared at his drink. He didn’t seem very convinced.

“Listen, kid. You know what they’d’ve done to you if I hadn’t happened along? They’d’ve killed you and taken your corpse to their workshop. They can scrape stiffs, and they’re easier to handle—don’t struggle. Then these guys, these pirates... they’d open your skull and go in deep and scrape the cerebellum, leaving your nervous system wrung out and fucked up. They’d get more than just emotions, they’d get everything. They’d rob you of your very self just to make a few fast creds, and then dump your body. And there’d be nothing no rep-surgeon could do to put you back together. You’d be dead. The only place you’d exist is on tape and as a ghost in the heads of non-telepaths who want the sensation of experiencing other states of being without having the operation.”

I took a long drink then, angry with him. “And keep that shield. I want you to stay alive. Consider it a present.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“For chrissake!” I exploded. “Where the hell do you usually drop? Don’t you know what a shield is for?”

“I work a line out of Lhasa, Kathmandu, Qorakpur... They’re quiet cities. I never really needed a shield there. This is my first time here...” He avoided my eyes and gazed out at the city.

“Yeah, well—think on next time. This isn’t no third world dive. This is for real. Mean City Central where you have to think to survive.”

He nodded, sipped his drink.

I cooled. “Where you from, Joe?”

“Seville, Europe. You?”

“Chittagong, what was onetime Bangladesh. China now.”

His gaze lingered on my tattoo. Then he saw the face on the back of my hand. “Your husband?”

I laughed. “Hey, Mr Innocent—you never seen one of these before?” I waved my hand around theatrically. “This guy’s my boss. He owns me. I’m indentured to him for another ten years.”

“I never realised...”

“No, well you wouldn’t, would you?” I glared at him, bitter. Then I smiled. I had to remind myself that I had a Mr-Nice-Guy here, who was naive-for-real and wasn’t playing me along.

I sighed, gave him history. “My parents sold me when I was four. They were poor and they needed the Rupees. I was one of six kids, and a girl, so I guess they didn’t miss me... I checked out psi-positive when I was five and had the operation. I had no say in the matter, they just cut me and hey-presto I had the curse of ability. I was taken by an Agency, trained, and sold to Gassner when I was six. I’ve been reading for small cred, ‘gum and a bed in a slum dwelling for nine years now.”

Joe Gomez was shocked. “Can’t you... I mean,” he shrugged. “Get out?”

“Like I said, in ten years when my indenture runs its course. This makes sure I don’t do anything stupid.” I held up the miniature of Gassner, his face stilled now; it’d come to life when he contacted me. “With this he knows where I am at all times. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

We rapped for ages, ordered tostadas, drank. Beneath the jive-assed, streetwise exterior I was like a little girl on her first date. I was trembling, and my voice cracked falsetto with excitement.

 Joe Gomez... He was short, dark, around twenty. He had a strong, handsome face, but his eyes were evasive and shy. It was what lived behind those eyes that I was interested in, though... He was pure, and I needed pure. I wanted to get into him, become one. I was nothing special to look at, but I was sure that if I let him take a look inside my head, gave him the experience... But at the same time I was scared shitless I might frighten him away.

We watched the dawn spread behind distant towerpiles.

My heart was hammering when I said tentatively, “Where you staying, Joe?”

“I just got in. I haven’t fixed a place yet. Maybe you know somewhere?”

“I...” There was something in my mouth, preventing words. “You can always stay at my place. It’s not much, but...” Sweet Allah, my eyes were brimming again.

“I don’t know...”

“Give me the shield,” I said.

“I get it. If I don’t come with you, you want your present back, right?” He sounded hurt.

“Balls. I might be other things but I’m no cheat. I want to show you something.”

He passed me the shield, a silver oval a little smaller then a joint case, and I put it out of range on a nearby table. His goodness swamped me, and I swooned in the glow. I pushed myself at him, invaded him, showed him what it was like to have someone inside his head... Then we staggered from the towerpile and rode the boulevard to the slums.

Joe was on a three-week furlough, and we spent every day together. We were inseparable, cute lovers like you see on the boulevard Sunday afternoons. The girl from Chittagong and the boy from Seville... I got better quick, saned-up and began enjoying life. I stopped drifting and phased out the ‘gum. I didn’t need them, now. Joe was my kick, and I overdosed.

We explored the city together. I saw life through his eyes, and what I saw was good. We tried personatapes. He’d be an Elizabethan dandy for a day, and I’d be Bo Ventura, latest hologram movie queen. Once we even sexed as Sir Richard Burton and Queen Victoria, just for the hell of it. We made straight love often, and sometimes we’d exchange bodies; I’d become him and he’d become me. I’d move into him, pushing into his central nervous system and transferring him to mine. I’d experiment with the novelty of a male body, in control of slabs of muscle new to me, and Joe would thrill to the sensation of vagina and breasts. At climax we’d be unable to hold on any longer and the rapture of returning, our disembodied personas twanging back to base, left us wiped out for hours.

Then one day towards the end of his furlough Joe pulled me out of bed and dressed me in my black skinsuit like a kid. We boarded a flier and mach’d uptown. “Where to?” I asked, sleepy ‘gainst his shoulder.

“I’m a spacer-” he said, which I’d figured already. He was an Engineman, a fluxer whose shift was three months in a tank pushing a Satori Line bigship through the nada-continuum. “And I want to show you something.”

We decanted atop the Satori Line towerpile that housed the space museum, and entered a triangular portal flanked by company militia. The chamber inside corresponded to the shape of the portal, a steel grey wedge, and we were the only visitors that day. By the entrance was the holographic sculpture of a man, vaguely familiar; the scientist who discovered the nada-continuum and opened the way for the starships.

Through Joe I had experienced everything that he’d experienced. His past was mine, his every sensation a shared event. I’d travelled with him to Timbuktu—and as far as Epsilon Indi. But there was one experience of his that defied my comprehension. When he entered the flux-tank of a bigship I could not go with him; I had no idea what it was to flux. Joe knew, of course, but he was unable to describe the sensation. He likened it to a mystical experience, but when I pressed him he could draw no real analogues. To flux was an experience of the soul, he said, and not of the mind—which was perhaps why I floundered.

We walked down the ringing aisle of the space museum. At the far end, on the plinth and cordoned by a low-powered laser-guard, was a trapezoid of blackness framed in a stasis-brace. What we had here, according to the inscription, was a harnessed chunk of the nada-continuum.

It did nothing to impress a sleepy Bangladeshi, until she saw the expression on the face of her lover. Gomez was a goner; even transfer-sex had failed to wipe him like this. “Joe...?”

He came to his senses and glanced over his shoulder at the entrance. Then he vaulted over the laser-guard and lifted me quickly after him. “This is it, Sita. Take a look.”

After a time the blackness became more than just an absence of light. It swirled and eddied in a mystical vortex like obsidian made fluid. I too became mesmerised, drawn towards a fathomless secret never to be revealed.

“What is it?” I asked, stupidly. I leaned forward. Joe held me back. He warned me that the interface could decapitate me as neat as any guillotine.

“It’s the essence of nothing, Sita. That which underpins everything. It’s Heaven and Nirvana and Enlightenment. The ultimate Zen state...”

His voice became inaudible, and then he said, “I’ve been there...” And I recalled something—the ineffable blackness I’d scanned a while back. My mind reached out for something just beyond its grasp, a mental spectre as elusive as the wind... Then the spell was broken.

Joe laughed, pulled himself away and smiled at me. He jumped back over the laser-guard and plucked me out. We held each other then, and merged. His period of furlough was coming to an end. Soon he would be leaving me, drawn away to another rendezvous with the nada-continuum. I should have been jealous, perhaps. But instead I was grateful to whatever it was that made him... himself.

Hand in hand we ran through the chamber like kids.

Allah, those three weeks...

They had to end, and they did.

And it happened that Joe died a fluxdeath pushing his boat through the Out-there beyond star Groombridge. That which had nourished him kicked back and killed him, with just three days to go before he came home to me.

* * * *

I quit Gassner’s and drop to the boulevard, my head full of Becky Kennedy and her loving parents. As I leave the towerpile a shadow latches on to me and tails, keeping a safe distance. I ride the boulevard to the coast.

Carnival town is a lighted parabola delineating the black bite of the bay. I choose myself a quiet jetty away from the sonic vibes and photon strobes, fold myself into the lotus position and wait.

Overhead, below a million burning stars, bigships drift in noiseless, clamped secure in phosphorescent stasis-grids. Ten kilometres out to sea the spaceport pontoon is a blazing inferno, with a constant flow of starships arriving and departing. Joe blasted out from here on his last trip, and for weeks after his departure the dull thunder of the ships, phasing out of this reality, brought tears to my eyes. Back then I came out here often, sat and contemplated the constellations, the stars where Joe might’ve been. He’s back now, but I still like to stare into space and try to figure out just where the accident happened.

A noise along the jetty, the clapping of a sun-warped board, indicates my shadow has arrived. I sense his presence, towering over me. “Spider,” I say. “Sit down. I’ve been expecting you.” And I have—he’s one of the few people I can rely on to help me.

Spider Lo is a first-grade telepath and he works for the biggest Agency in the West. He’s about as thin as me, but twice as tall. He earned enough last year to buy himself a femur-extension, and I was the first to admit he looked really impressive riding the boulevard, especially in a crowd. He’s a Chink, and I should hate him for that, but he’s a gentle guy and we get along fine.

“Gassner sent me, Sita.”

“That much I figured.”

“He told me to make sure you did your stuff. To me, it doesn’t look like you’re doing that out here.”

He hesitates, watching me. “I’ll let you into a secret, Sita. Gassner’s in big trouble. Business is bad and a few of the bigger Agencies are going for the take-over. They’d buy Gassner out for peanuts and employ him as a nothing button-pusher. As for you—you’d be taken on by whichever Agency buys. You’d be on longer shifts for less pay. You’re a second-grader, remember...”

I let him mouth-off. His secret is no secret at all. He’s telling me nothing I don’t already know. I let my lazy posture describe apathy, and stare at the stars.

Spider tries again. “This case is worth two million to Gassner. It would mean solvency for him, and who knows even a rise for you. But you’re blowing it.”

“And won’t Mr Gassner be angry with me,” I say.

“Sita... this is the biggest case you’ve ever had to crack. You don’t seem to be trying...”‘

Languid, I give him a look, long and cool. “Maybe I don’t need to try,” I say.

“Sita...” His Oriental features pantomime despair.

“I’m serious, Spider. Hasn’t it occurred to you that maybe the reason I’m lazing around here is because I’ve got the case wrapped up?”

His eyes glint with quick respect, then suspicion.

“No shit,” I say. “I know where Becky Kennedy’s meat is hidden.”

“You just this minute left the office, Sita.”

I shrug. “How would you like to earn your Agency the two million riding on this case?” I ask him.

He tries a probe. I feel it prickle my head like a mental porcupine in a savage mood. But my shield is up to it.

“You don’t have to probe, Spider. I’m honest—I’ll tell you. Your Agency can pick up the creds from Kennedy when you find the body and deliver it to the resurrection ward-”

“But Gassner...” Understanding hits him.

“Yeah,” I say. “You’ve got it.”

Spider looks at me.

“Why you doing this, Sita? If Gassner folds, you get transferred, and that won’t be a picnic for you.”

“Listen, Spider. I’m getting out of it altogether. No more probing for this kid after tomorrow.”

“You’re not-” Alarm in his voice.

I laugh. “No, I’m not. I’m getting out and I want to see Gassner sink...” But there’s an easier way than this to tell him.

I take my shield and toss it to him. He catches it, holds it for a second, then throws it back. That’s all it takes for him to read what I’m planning. And he reads everything: my love for Joe and the reason I need big money, what I did yesterday and why I did it. He reads what I want him to do, and he slowly nods his head. “Very well, Sita. fine...” We finalise the arrangements, and then slap on it. We sit for a while, watching the starships and chatting, until Spider’s handset calls him away on a case. He cranes himself upright and strides off down the jetty like someone on stilts.

I stay put a while. Above the city a hologram projection, like a stage in the sky, is beaming out world news. I watch the pictures but can’t be bothered with the sub-titles. Only when the business review comes on do I take an interest. After five minutes the takeover bids are flashed up. Multi-Tec International today made bids for a dozen small-fry—one of them, I learn, Gassner’s Investigative Agency. But the bid didn’t make it and Gassner is still independent. I smile to myself. By the time I finish with Gassner he’ll be wishing he never bought me, all those years ago.

I leave the coast and ride back into the city. I stop off at a call booth and get through to the Kennedys, using the teleprinter to make the demand. Then, instead of going straight to the Union towerpile, I make a detour to take in the cryogenic hive-complex, uptown. I ride the chute to the seventh level and squat beside Joe’s pod. If I concentrate I can just make out his thoughts, deep down and indistinct. Even diluted, crystallised and fragmented by the freeze, his emotions are still as good and pure as always. I tell him that soon it’ll all be over, and he responds with a distant, mental smile.

I’m tearful when I leave the hive and ride across town.

* * * *

After I heard about Joe’s death I began drifting again.

I got back on the ‘gum and stopped eating and hit the darktime quarter. When I wasn’t working I got high and drifted without sleep for nights, probing, seeking... It was impossible, of course. What I was seeking I had found and lost, and there could be no substitutes, however good. There were no more Joes, and it was no good telling myself that there had to be. It was too soon after his death and I was still too close to him to accept anyone else.

Then I got it into my head that Joe was still alive. I thought I could feel his brainvibes in the air, as if he existed somewhere in the world and was trying to get through to me. I concentrated and struggled to contact him, to prove to myself that he was still alive. Crazy, I know...

But I was right.

It was a month after the accident and I spent more and more time tripping on acid shorts and trying to forget. I reckoned that if maybe I could lose my identity, then the pain wouldn’t be so bad.

Joe called a couple of nights later.

I was laid out on my bunk, coming down after a week of crazy, crazy nights drifting and tripping. My head was alive with vivid nightmares and Joe played a starring role.

When his face appeared on the vidscreen I knew it was a hallucination. “Sita!” it shouted. “It’s me—Joe!”

I giggled. “I know you’re dead, Joe. You died Out-there. You can’t kid me.”

“Sita...” His arms were braced on either side of the screen, and his head hung close. It looked like Joe, but there was something wrong with the geometry of the features. They were too clean-cut and perfect to be Joe’s, even though they resembled his. Some effect of the acid, obviously...

“Sita, please—listen!” He was near to tears. “I know I died a fluxdeath. But they got me out in time. They saved me. They put me back together in a Soma-Sim and-”

“Where are you?” But I didn’t believe. I was still hallucinating. Joe was dead, and what I saw on the screen was a phantom of my imagination.

“That’s why I called. I need your help. I’m at the city sub-orb station. I just got in. I need your help...” He looked over the screen, then behind him. When he stared at me again I saw that he was swaying, holding the set for support.

I crawled across the bunk and sat on the edge. I could not bring myself to believe, however much I wanted to. If I rested all my hope on what turned out to be cruel illusion...

“Joe... What’s wrong, Joe?”

“They’re after me, Sita. The pirates. They almost had me. I got away. Please... come and get me.” He grinned then, a wry quirk of the lips I knew so well and loved. “I can’t move. They hit me and I can’t move. I managed to get this far...”

I staggered around the room and collected my clothes. I struggled into the bare minimum required for decency and dropped to the street. I hailed a flier, gave the destination and collapsed in the back seat. I knew there’d be no Joe when I got there; already our dialogue was becoming dreamlike. It was too much to hope that I could save him a second time...

At the station I told the flier to wait and stumbled into the crowded foyer. I wasn’t wearing my ferronniere and the absence of brainhowl was a relief. The call-booths were ranked at the far end beside a Somalian fast-food joint. I pushed through the crowd and collapsed against the first crystal pod. The caller inside gestured me away. I staggered from booth to booth, my desperation increasing when each one turned out to be empty. With three to go and still no sign of Joe I gave up and went berserk. I crashed against them one after the other, flailing at the doors with my fists. The last door remained stubbornly shut, as if pinned by a weight on the inside. I peered over the privacy screen and my heart went nova. Joe had slipped to the floor with his cyber-legs folded beneath him at crazy angles. He grinned when he saw me and reached out his arms...

I managed somehow to get him into the flier and back to my pad.

Once inside he collapsed on the bunk, the Joe Gomez I knew and loved, but different. The only part of him that had survived the fluxdeath was his brain, and the rest of him was a power-assisted Somatic-Simulation with all the sex bits and the latest Nikon optics. It was impossible to tell that the body was a Soma-Sim; the surgeons had been faithful to Joe’s old appearance, if anything making him even more good looking than the original version.

I thought maybe I was still hallucinating...

“They were waiting at the port,” he said. “They waited till I got in from the medic-base and they shot me, Sita. But I got away...” And he indicated his leg.

There was a hole in his thigh big enough to contain my fist. Charred strands of microcircuitry fuzzed the circumference, and the synthetic flesh had melted and congealed in dribbles like cold wax.

“It doesn’t hurt,” Joe reassured me, peering down. “I don’t feel a thing. It’s just that I can’t walk...”

“We’ll get you fixed up,” I said.

“You’ve got a spare half million?”

“Surely the Line-?”

He laughed. “They took all my savings to put me in this.”

“We’ll find some way,” I said. “Can’t you go back-?”

His hand moved to touch the hole, with just the faintest whirr of servo-motors. “The Line’s fired me, Sita. I’m in no condition to flux and I’m out of a job...” Tears were beyond the expertise of 21st-century cyberneticists, or Joe would have cried, then.

“Can you remember anything about the attack?” I asked.

“Not much. Three guys piled out of an air-car and called out to me. When I began to run, they opened fire-”

“Did you get the flier’s plate?”

“I was too busy trying to survive, Sita.”

I probed. I relived the attack and saw the same three guys I’d seen outside the Yin-Yang. The subconscious mind forgets nothing, and the quick glance Joe had taken at the air-car had lodged the plate code in his head. I memorised the code and came out. It was a slim lead, but perhaps a valuable one.

Joe reached out and pulled me to him. “You haven’t said how good it is to have me back, Sita.”

“No?” I opened up, and we merged. Beyond his relief at being with me I saw a dark shadow in the background, a sharp regret that he would never flux again. He was like a junkie deprived his fix, and the withdrawal symptoms were craving and melancholia. I shouldn’t have felt jealous, but I did.

The following day I decided that my pad was not a safe place for Joe. Too many people had seen his arrival, and all it would take was for the scrape-tape pirate’s telepath to send out a chance probe in the vicinity.

I had a contact in the cryogenic-hive complex uptown, and Joe agreed that this would be the best place for him until I came up with the creds to buy the services of a cyber-surgeon. I had a few ideas I wanted to think over during the next couple of days. I installed him in the hive, then left for Gassner’s office.

I told my boss I was using the Batan II to check detail on the current case, and instead tapped into the city plate file. I found the number of the flier Joe had seen, and I was in luck. The flier was a company vehicle belonging to the Wringsby-Saunders Corporation. I looked them up and found they were into everything, but their biggest turnover was in the personatape market...

So I dropped to the boulevard and rode uptown.

The Wringsby-Saunders Corporation had a towerpile all to themselves, a hundred storey obelisk with a flashy WS entwined and rotating above the penthouse suit.

I marched in, exuding bravura.

I roamed. I was looking for company personnel with faces that matched those I carried around in my head. I took in every level and a couple of hours later found what I wanted. A tall executive left his office and strode along the corridor towards me. He wore silvered shades and an arrogant expression. He was shielded, of course—as he was on the last occasion I had encountered him. In the defective fluorescent lighting outside the Yin-Yang bar.

The glow-tag on the door of his office told me: Martin Kennedy. He was the marketing director of the personatape division, one of the top jobs in the Corporation. And not satisfied with a director’s fat salary, Kennedy dirtied his fingers with illegal scrape-tape dealings. Some people...

Over the next few days I neglected my duties for Gassner and followed Kennedy. It was my intention to blackmail him; his superiors at Wringsby-Saunders would not be amused that one of their top executives was dealing in death...

Then something happened to make me change my mind. There was a better way of extracting what I wanted from Kennedy, one that did away with the risk to myself.

It came to me as I watched him arrive home one evening and meet his daughter in the drive. It was one of the few occasions when he was unshielded, and I learned that the only pure and unsullied emotion in Kennedy’s head was the love he had for his daughter, Becky.

While Kennedy was unshielded I slipped him the sly, subliminal suggestion than Gassner’s Investigative Agency was the best in town, specialising in murders, kidnappings, missing persons... The first place he’d think of when he found his daughter gone would be Gassner’s.

I turned my attention to Becky and checked her movements. She had her own bodyguard who escorted her everywhere. Well, almost everywhere. He was a big, ugly bastard, but I wasn’t going to let him stand in my way at this stage of the game.

I decided the best place to strike would be in the gym she used every Tuesday morning. I joined up for the classes and obeyed all the instructions like a good girl, despite the protests from my drug-wrecked body. I arrived early Tuesday morning and watched Becky at her callisthenics while her minder did the same, only with more interest in how she filled her leotard in all the erogenous-zones-to-be.-

I was right behind them when they left the free-fall chamber. I’d taken the precaution of putting the chute out of action and barring the communicating doors. We were quite alone.

I hit the bodyguard with the neural-incapacitator and he dropped like a sack of wet sand. Then I did the same to Becky before she got a look at me. While the guy was still jerking his beef on the floor I dragged Becky along the corridor and into the service chute.

I’d prepared myself for this part of the operation all week. I’d told myself over and over that this was not murder, that before the three days had elapsed little Becky would be patched up and resurrected and as good as new. If not better. Inside a fortnight she’d be back working out at the gym, her death a thing of the past. Even so, as I pulled the trigger of the pistol I had to close my eyes and think of Joe... Then I photographed the corpse and concealed it behind a sliding panel. I’d done my homework and checked. The next chute inspection was due in a week.

I left the gym and mailed the developed print to the Kennedys. Then I made for the Supernova and drank acid shorts to help me forget.

Hours later, the call from Gassner came through.

* * * *

I cross town and head for the Union towerpile. “Bangladesh!” the cackle greets me. Old Pete the Beggar grins toothless along the sidewalk. I slip him ten and he lays ‘gum on me. I’m high by the time I hit the foyer.

Spider Lo has done his stuff. He sits with Kennedy in the ground floor bar, done out in the deco of a bigship. I hoist myself onto a highstool, businesslike.

Kennedy gives me the inscrutable look through his silvered shades, but the empty glasses at his elbow belie his cool. “I’d like to know what’s going on?” he asks me. “This... this gentleman apprehended me outside and claimed to be working with you on the case. I hope you’ve found my daughter-”

“Do you have the crystals?” I ask.

Kennedy hesitates, then lifts a valise onto the table. He opens it to reveal two sparkling crystals burning within the leatherette gloom. The substance locked inside them glints like powdered diamond. I take the valise.

“The Gassner Agency has been taken over,” I tell Kennedy now. “As such, it no longer exists. Mr Lo here represents the Massingberd Agency. You will pay his Agency upon completion of the case.”

“My daughter?”

“By the time I deliver the crystals, your daughter will be in the safe care of the city hospital.”

Kennedy nods his understanding. Spider Lo pushes papers across the table and Kennedy signs. “Mr Lo will take you to the hospital, Mr Kennedy.” I shake him formally by the hand, but his shield deflects my probe.

We move outside and Spider and I slap palms and go our separate ways. Little Becky Kennedy will be alive again in a short while. Thirty minutes ago Spider rushed a medic-squad to the gym to retrieve her corpse, and soon she’ll be respiring normally in the resurrection ward, the attack edited from her memory, looking forward to whatever it is little girls look forward to nowadays. Her sub-orbital trip to Vienna, maybe.

I ride the boulevard, one last time. In case Kennedy suspected anything and put a watch on me, I dodge clever. I alight on 5th and take a devious detour through the downtown quarter, lose myself in crowds and backtrack numerously. Then I hire a flier and mach uptown to the cryogenic-hive.

After the formalities of payment and after-care instructions, I decant my shining knight from his sarcophagus and assist him to the flier. His head is hardly awake yet, barely thawed from the cryogenic state, and it’s his power-assisted Soma-Sim that walks him from the ziggurat.

I think love at him to help the thaw.

I programme the destination of Rio de Janeiro into the flier, but before we set off there’s the small matter of my indenture to sort out. I fly to the Satori Line towerpile, Joe immobile beside me. I leave the flier on the landing pad, drop to the twentieth level and enter the museum.

I have to wait a while before a rich family decide they’ve had their fill of wonder, and when they leave I leap over the laser-guard surrounding the shimmering shield of the nada-continuum.

I stand mesmerised, regardless of the danger should anyone enter and find me here. Before me is the ultimate, the primal state we all aspire to—the only thing ever to be wholly beyond my ability to grasp.

My contemplation is interrupted by a glow at the end of my arm. My hand tingles. Gassner’s miniature portrait becomes animated. I hold up my arm, as if shielding my eyes from the nada-continuum, and stare at him. “What do you want, Gassner?”

“Sita!” he cries, and he uses my real name only in times of stress. His regular pallor is suffused now with the crimson of rage, and he’s sweating. “Sita—where’s Kennedy? I thought you-”

“I didn’t crack the case, Gassner. Spider Lo got there first. Kennedy owes the Massingberd Agency, not you.”

“Sita!” He’s almost in tears. “Get back here!”

I smile. “I’m sorry, Gassner. I’m through. I’ve had enough and I’m getting out. Goodbye-”

He panics. He knows that without a telepath he’s nothing. “You can’t, Bangla-”

I can, and the desk is lost as I thrust my hand into the nada-continuum/reality interface. The satisfaction of getting rid of Gassner dilutes the pain of losing my hand; my tele-ability repels the frenzied communications shooting up my arm and keeps the agony below the tolerance threshold. The wrist is neatly severed when I stagger back, the stump cauterised and blackened. I jump the barrier and stumble through the chamber.

The hologram of the scientist stands beside the portal. Pedro Fernandez, discoverer of the nada-continuum and opener of the way. He seems to be smiling at me, and I know the smile. I give him a wink as I leave.

Joe touches my hand as I climb into the flier and take off. We bank over the city and head towards the ocean. I probe him. His head is slowly coming to life, warming as if to the sunlight that shines through the screen. I read Joe’s need, his craving.

Above the city, canted at an angle, the hologram screen pours morning news over a waking world. Did the Gassner Agency surrender to the take-over bids that must surely come now? Come on, an ending like that would be just too storybook. I can only wait until we reach Rio and find out then.

Meantime, I hope.

Weakly, Joe says, “You get the crystals?”

I open the valise and shake them into his lap.

“Pineal-z,” I tell him, and I open up and let him have the experience I had monthsback when I tripped on Pineal-z and lived.

“It’s Pineal-z or me, kid,” I tell him. “Enlightenment or love. Take your pick.” And I withdraw, close up. I don’t want to influence his decision and I don’t want to eavesdrop on his infatuation with something I can never hope to understand.

Old Pete? Yeah, he kidded me not. He was someone famous, onetime. He was probably the most famous person in the world. He was Pedro Fernandez yearsback, discoverer of the nada-continuum and opener of the way.

I know for sure now that Old Pete is good, behind that shield of his...

I glance across at Joe. He’s staring at the crystals in his hand, weighing the experience he had and lost against whatever I can give him. He drops the crystals back into the valise, looks at me. “We’ll sell them when we get to Rio, Sita. Find a cyber-surgeon to fix my leg and get you a new paw.”

Enlightenment, or love? Perhaps they’re one and the same thing.

Tears fill my eyes as I fly us away from the city and into the sunrise, one-handed.