To Sterling E. Lanier,

who was among the first

to start wondering about me

I would like to thank the skilled professionals who caught the errors, made the cuts, cleaned up the typos, called me on the logical flaws, and generally tidied up after me in this book.

If you ever write a book, and can get Thomas B. Allen, John Betancourt, Betsy Mitchell, Stanley Schmidt or Susie West to look it over, then you'll be doing all right. If you can get all of them, you'll have been as lucky as I was. But don't think they'll be easy on you. Thank God.

"Damn it all we want to get at the truth!" [said Lord Peter Wimsey.]

"Do you?" said Sir Impey drily. "I don't. I don't care twopence about the truth. I want a case."

— Dorothy L. Sayers, Clouds of Witness

PRELUDE

/ go into spasm as the killing pain strikes at me again. The simple act of lifting my hand to a switch is enough to wrack my entire body in agony, send me collapsing to the floor, quivering in torment.

If there was any doubt left in my mind, this blinding fire is enough to erase it. It is time to escape. Either go to a new home, or die. At least this way I will die on my terms, playing by my rules, before the pain leaves me a mere gibbering idiot, no longer able to choose my own time.

If I chance to survive the experience, all the better. If not, at least I will go out trying, not a passive victim of a pointless, meaningless accident.

With my last shreds of determination, I haul my ruined body up off the floor and into the powerchair — the stupid, useless, archaic powerchair that is all the politicians can begrudge me. The technology is here to allow me more, so much more life. Mechanical legs to replace my amputated limbs, pseudo-organs to replace my slowly failing liver and kidnevs, any month enhancements to give me back some measure of what I have lost.

But the laws say no. Because my injuries involve my In Because repairing the damage would require nerve W

rective brain surgery — and the implantation of a few grams of microcircuits into my head. The laws, the arbitrary rules established to prevent things that could never happen anyway, say I cannot be helped: mechanical alteration of the brain is illegal. Rules and laws made by fear, not reason. The laws say I must fade away, a crippled ruin. Suzanne does not know how bad it is. She believes that I can live indefinitely. But the facts are far grimmer: without the corrective surgery, I will die in agony. The only question is when. A few weeks, or months at most, if I die their way.

I cannot hope to change the laws in time. I am too weak. All the people like me in the country are, by definition, too weak, clinging to life too feebly, ever to work up a fight.

I have my own game in mind. Win or lose, survive or vanish altogether, I will do it my way, not theirs.

All that remains is the act itself

Moving slowly, carefully, I set the timer, wishing again there had been time to set up a more sophisticated control system. But every day I grow weaker, and I dare not try too hard for perfection. I fear that I have made some error, some miscalculation, but it is impossible to think clearly through this cloud of pain.

I roll my powerchair forward, reach up with pain-palsied hands and slip the induction helmet down over my rough-shaven head. Herbert is here, ready for me.

I have recorded a letter to my wife, to Suzanne, into Herbert's memory store. He will deliver it, speak my words in his voice. A backup copy of the letter waits hidden in the computer net, programmed for delivery in a year's time. That should be time enough for her pain to ease, for the news to be less shocking. If I fail, she at least will know what has happened, but no one else.

I realize my eyes are shut and force them open, force myself to see the dull grey walls of the lab. For such might be the last sight I will ever see. Eyes open, staring wide, I wait for the end.

And then the massive, delicate surge of power flashes through my helmet — and the universe crashes out of existence as my mind is torn apart.

CHAPTER 1 RIGHTS OF THE ACCUSED

Patrolman Phillipe Sanders sat back in his seat and watched as the squad car pulled itself over to the curb. His partner, LuAnne Johnson, was letting the car do the driving as she read over the paperwork one last time. "You sure this is for real?" she asked. The doubt in her voice was plain to hear.

The squad car stopped itself. The door on Sanders's side opened, and he stepped out onto the pavement. Strange to be out in the field again, after so long working in the equipment maintenance division. But a cop was a cop, and he could make this bust as well as anyone. Maybe better. Presumably that was Chief Thurman's logic. The Old Man himself had tapped Sanders for this job.

It was a warm day for early June, and the famous Washington, D.C., humidity wrapped itself softly around him. The sky was a gentle misty blue, and the birds were singing. A perfect late spring day.

He looked up at the house. Big place. Imposing long, winding walkway led up from the street to a majestic three-Story brick mansion. Residence of one Su/anne Jantille. Residence—or former residence, depending on

how you looked at it—of her husband, one David Bailey. Obviously two or three houses on either side torn down during the popdrop to make room for the expansive grounds. Lots of money here. Folks in places like this were used to getting their own way. Are these the kind of people the U.S. Attorney really wants to mess with? Phil wondered. Maybe someone hadn't thought this thing out all the way. Never mind, that wasn't his problem. It was enough just to worry about the facts of the case.

Phil Sanders had read the printout on this case. Suzanne Jantille wasn't a name he had known offhand— but Bailey, that was another story. Not famous to the public, maybe, but Phil Sanders fixed police robots for a living. Anyone in robotics had to know Bailey's name.

And now, Phil had to come and arrest him for murder.

Sort of.

Johnson stepped from her side of the car and nodded bemusedly. The car closed its doors and went into standby mode.

"Is this for real?" Johnson asked again.

Sanders shook his head. "It's legitimate. That I can tell you. But I've got to admit it doesn't seem too real to me, either." Phil realized that LuAnne seemed as doubtful as he was—and she didn't know half what Sanders did.

Sanders pulled his personal monitor out of its pocket over his heart, switched it on, and slid it back into place, making sure the lens was facing forward and out. The little cylinder's camera and mike would relay sight and sound back to the squad car, and the car's on-board artificial intelligence system would monitor and record. In theory, the car would know when to call for backup. Phil repaired the things, and knew the system was an uncertain protection at best, but the regs said to wear a pow-ered-up monitor away from the squad car at all times. Like most police officers who didn't get into the field much, Sanders did everything by the book when he did get out.

LuAnne Johnson watched her partner and snorted

contemptuously. "Wise up, kid. Them things ain't smart enough to do any good."

Phil decided not to reply. LuAnne Johnson didn't believe in any regulation that didn't suit her. He switched the topic of discussion back to the safer subject of the bust. "I still can't believe they're serious about wanting to arrest this guy," Phil said.

Johnson, walking ahead of him, shrugged theatrically. She spoke without looking back at him, holding the warrant up over her shoulder and waving it. "The judge signed this and the chief okayed the bust personally. He's taking it seriously. Hell's bells, he sent two cops—two live cops—to serve this thing. Not just one, even with all the cutbacks, with the chief all the time bitching that we can't use robots to serve warrants. That's what we oughta do, so we could get human cops out on the beat breaking up gangs."

Or back at the coffee shop soaking up doughnuts, Phil Sanders thought. LuAnne Johnson was far better known on the force for indolence than vigorous pursuit of criminal suspects. Phil had his doubts that any human labor saved from service of warrants would actually be put to use fighting crime. But that was not the point.

Right now, they had a vacuum cleaner to arrest.

A vacuum cleaner, for God's sake. What was it all coming to?

Suddenly something moved, something bright, glittering, low slung off, to one side of the house, among the flowers. Phil was edgy. His hand moved reflexively toward his weapon. But it was just a garden weasel, a cat-sized robot intent on nothing more nefarious than garden maintenance, its cutter-digger arms making short work of the weeds, its tank treads whirring back and forth as it moved carefully among the plants.

There was something busy, urgent about its movements, and it stopped its work every now and again, Seeming to pause and look around itself. Squirrel-brain mindload, Sanders guessed with a practiced eye. Maybe some rabbit and probably monkey—popular for small ro-

bots with manipulators. Maybe even some actual weasel. But tank treads or no, its movements reminded him irresistibly of a squirrel burying nuts for the winter.

A human-shaped gardener machine came around the side of the house, carrying a pair of shears. Ignoring the police officers because it was not programmed to notice people, it knelt on the grass at the side of the walk and set to work edging the lawn.

"Crummy robot doing that?" Johnson asked angrily.

That's right. A hundred-thousand-dollar machine with a pair of ten-dollar garden shears, Sanders thought, but he knew Johnson wasn't thinking that way. To her mind, gardens were something a person took care of, personally. Gardening was not work for servants, but a task of pride for a house-proud property owner. LuAnne Johnson was mad because, in her eyes, the robot was acting like it owned the place.

Sanders shook his head sadly. Like so many people, it seemed that Johnson's feelings for human-shaped machines never got past fear and contempt. Suppose this case worked out the way it might, and people like her were forced to deal with machine-shaped people? "It's not a robot, LuAnne," he said. "A full robot would have noticed us. It's an HTM. An humanoid teleoperator machine, run by remote control, probably from inside the house."

"Robot, HTM, cyborg, remote," she growled. "All the lousy same tin boxes prancing around like people."

Good to hear such an enlightened, informed opinion, Sanders thought. Phil knew LuAnne Johnson barely well enough to call her by her first name. The two of them had eaten in the same diners, been at the same roll calls, off and on for years, but never had had much to do with each other before today. Phil had been handpicked to perform this arrest, but it was clear to him that Johnson was here through random selection, along for the ride because doctrine called for two cops on a murder bust, and she was available, her regular partner out sick. How much of her homework had she done? "LuAnne, you

know much about this case?" he asked, pausing on the way up the long walkway.

Johnson stopped, turned, and looked back at him, squinting a bit in the morning sun over Phil's shoulder. "Just that we've gotta bust a frigging vacuum cleaner, that's all."

"That's what I thought." Doesn't anyone in the field ever read the background data? Phil wondered testily. The police datanet was excellent—it could pull up a complete national police record on a suspect, along with any other public knowledge, instantly. Why didn't the street cops ever use it? "I checked the background datasheet on this one before we left the station," Phil said, braving her contempt for going by the book. "Lots of newsclips in the file. There's a few details you ought to know. One, Suzanne Jantille is a criminal lawyer. A good one. Maybe she'll take the case herself. Two, Bailey and Jantille were both in a bad road accident six months ago, last December. In a public cab when its programming shorted out. The cab rammed into a wall."

"So?"

"So they both got mashed up pretty bad. The news reports say it put Bailey in a powerchair. No report on what happened to Jantille."

"And what does that mean?"

"Either that she got lucky, walked away without a scratch—or else that it was really bad. So bad she saw to it her condition was not made public."

"So, like, she might be in a powerchair too?"

"Or worse," Sanders said, a bit stiffly.

Suddenly Johnson understood what he was driving at, and her face screwed up into an expression of disgust. "You saying she might have got herself cyborged?"

"Exactly. I don't know one way or the other. But ii is a possibility. The point is, this case is going to be tricky enough as it is, without her house monitors recording you showing some kind of prejudicial reaction. The prosecutors will be flaming mad it we dump a police discrimination charge into the middle ot this. So you just tell

yourself cyborgs are people, with equal rights under the law. I don't care if you believe that, as long as you act like you do on this bust. The chief will have our heads if we screw this up. Got it?"

LuAnne Johnson glared at her partner. But Phillipe Sanders was a man who stood his ground when he knew what he was talking about. She had seniority, but he was right. He looked her back in the eye with steady calm. After a heartbeat, she sighed and nodded. "Yeah, I got it."

They turned and walked the last few yards up to the front porch. They mounted the steps and came to the door. Johnson nearly made the gaffe of knocking, but stopped herself in time. It wouldn't be smart to start off with a privacy violation, not in this neighborhood. A house like this was certainly smart enough to see there were two cops at the door, and smart enough to know what to do about it.

"May I be of assistance, officers?" the door asked. It was a perfect, golden voice, dripping with refined courtesy, practically singing the words at them.

Johnson jumped a little and stepped back. She hesitated a moment, clearly uncomfortable with the idea of talking to a house. Sanders shook his head sadly. No doubt Johnson liked it back in the rough part of town, the poor parts where no one had talking machines to baffle her. Personally, Sanders couldn't understand what was the big deal.

"Metropolitan Police," Sanders said, taking over. "We have warrants to serve at this address. Advise Madame Jantille." That was the way to handle artificial intelligence. No pleases, no thank yous, just straight statements and clear orders. Artlnt machines were not entitled to human courtesy. Phil Sanders was careful not to offer them any. Politeness led straight into the human reflex of assigning social status, and then to speaking according to that status.. Trouble was, robots did not have social status, and therefore it was impossible to choose a correct manner of speech. Formal, informal, respectful, curt,

nasty, deferential—however you acted, it would be wrong, and the machine would respond with urbane courtesy, rendering your treatment of it utterly inappropriate, and throwing you off altogether. Far better to ignore the machine's social advances and stay in control.

"I am informed by Madame Jantille that she will not speak with you voluntarily."

"That's fine," Sanders said. "It's Herbert we're here for, anyway."

There was the briefest of pauses. They had surprised the house, and small wonder.

"I am to under-stand that you wish to speak with the house maintenance unit Madame Jantille has nicknamed Her-bert?" the house asked, in the slightly singsong cadences of a confused artificial mind.

Johnson suddenly lost her patience. "Not speak with it, arrest it." She spoke the words with obvious embarrassment, clearly tired of standing on someone's porch arguing with a house. "We have a legal warrant for its arrest, and warrants to search the house for it if need be. You programmed to deal with that, you goddamn tin box? Or do we get to break down the door?"

Sanders looked at his partner in shock, his blood running cold. Was Johnson crazy enough to go up against the self-defenses a place like this must have? He fervently hoped his monitor link to the car was working. They might need help.

"Of course/' the house replied smoothly. "All house operations systems are programmed for full cooperation with peace officers." The camera over the door swung out and down on a long flexcable. "If you will pr\ each page of the warrant to my camera system, and allow me to record your names and badge numbers, I will be able toco ir warrai

like you've got I r i sput-

tered.

"Calm down, LuAnne," Sanders said 'The damn thing dotsn t have a choice, that's the whole point Didn't you study the tech bulletins on h«

programmed to keep the place buttoned down tighter than a drum, an absolute injunction." He nodded at the camera and the house. "The damn thing's a computer. Unless Jantille authorizes otherwise, the only way we can override her command priority is by running a by-the-book warrant review, with all the homeowner's legal rights observed to the letter, //we do all that, it can open up. Otherwise, it's a flat impossibility."

"That what you do down in the robot pool, memorize that tech stuff and the legal crap?" Johnson asked.

Phil did not like people calling his workplace the robot pool, and he was starting to feel more than a bit irritated with Johnson. She seemed to feel ignorance and crudity were positive virtues. "Why not?" he asked snappishly. What the hell was wrong with studying up, learning your job? "The point is that without an override the house can't open up."

"Then why the hell doesn't this Jantille do the override if she's home?"

"She's got rights," Sanders said, trying to regain his patience. "Like against warrantless searches. She's exercising that one now, that's all. She's a lawyer, remember? Maybe she's in there figuring that if she makes us jump through all the hoops before we make the bust, we'll get mad and screw up somehow. You just came close to making her right, threatening to bust down the door. That what you want to do?"

Johnson glared at him again, and didn't seem about to give him an answer. She glanced at his monitor pocket, and Sanders understood. She had just remembered that everything was being recorded back at the car. She didn't want to get in any deeper.

Sanders sighed. "Here, give me those warrants," he said. He took the papers, opened them up, and held them flat for the camera, keeping each page in view for a full thirty seconds. Then he faced the camera himself, allowed it to get a good look at his face and badge. "Patrol Officer Phillipe Sanders, badge number 19109." He nodded toward Johnson to follow suit, but she hesitated.

"Come on, for God's sake, LuAnne."

She stepped forward and muttered into the camera mike. "Patrol Officer LuAnne Johnson, badge number 18083."

"Thank you, officers," the house said. The door swung open, and the two police officers stepped into a rather intimidating foyer, all cold marble and grand interior vistas. A formal central stairway stood in the middle of the hall, leading upward to a landing. Stairways led up from the landing to the left and right.

Sanders and Johnson stepped inside and stood in the foyer, craning their necks to look either way down the great hall that ran the length of the house.

"So now what?" Johnson asked.

Sanders shrugged. "I guess we—"

"Madame Jantille is coming now, officers," the house said.

Sanders heard the sound of footsteps behind them and turned around. Coming down the hallway from the far end of the house was the figure cf a woman, tall and lean, honey-brown hair done up in a bun, dressed in a neat business suit that erred slightly on the conservative side. She looked vigorous, alert, healthy, and confident. Not like someone who had barely survived a car crash six months before.

But then Sanders noticed what was wrong. She was a remote. Judging by her sharp intake of breath, Johnson caught it at the same moment he did.

"For God's sake, we gotta talk to her?" Johnson said in a half whisper.

"Quiet!" Sanders hissed urgently. "Don't let her freak us. We act professional, do our job, and get the hell out of here."

Suzanne Jantille stepped into the foyer and looked at the two of them, more than a bit "1 have read

the warrants," she said in clipped tones. "What is this nonsense?"

Right down to business, Sanders tho Jlos,

no pleases or thank yous o

the way I treated her house, Phil thought. "It's no nonsense, ma'am. These are legal warrants, and our orders are to serve them. As I'm sure you realize, you don't have much choice in the matter."

Suzanne Jantille clasped her hands together in front of her, knitting her fingers up into a tense knot. Her face was expressionless. "You intend to arrest my vacuum cleaner for the murder of my husband?"

Sanders looked at Johnson, but she was clearly happy to let him do the talking. Feeling more than a bit foolish, he nodded. "Yes, ma'am, that's right."

"I was not aware that inanimate machinery was liable under the criminal code. Do you generally arrest guns and sniper knives as well?"

Phil Sanders reddened visibly. "The U.S. Attorney, Julia Entwhistle, is of the opinion that your house maintenance unit, your, ah, vacuum cleaner, is not inanimate, but a person. And further that it was instrumental in your husband's death."

"That is flatly ridiculous. Herbert can't even speak anymore. Hasn't since David died."

A tiny alarm bell went off in Phil's head. "Doesn't speak anymore?" he asked. "You mean he used to speak?" Lots of robots talked—but not house maintenance units. There wouldn't be any point to it. The things didn't have enough volition to make speech worthwhile. So why make an HMU talk—and what could make it stop talking?

Suzanne Jantille looked down, away from Sanders. "David was working on Herbert, tinkering, really, just before he died. He tinkered a lot. I supposed David disabled the speech system for some reason, and Herbert hasn't talked since. That's all."

"But why—"

Suzanne looked up again, sharply, collecting herself. "I am not required to answer your questions," she said abruptly. "And I regard this whole situation as absurd."

"Ma'am, however you regard it, we are going to serve

these warrants/' Phil said. He concentrated on keeping his voice politely firm.

Suzanne Jantille stopped and regarded each of the two officers for a long moment. "Very well. If there is to be some sort of legal charade, I see that I have no choice but to play in it. House, order Herbert to come here."

The three of them stood in awkward silence for a long moment, and then a slight mechanical noise came from the upper landing. The police officers looked up and saw Herbert—it had to be Herbert—coming down the stairs.

Phil took a good long look at the subject of his arrest warrant. Herbert, he decided, looked like an oversize scuba tank with six stocky, multijointed mechanical legs attached.

Servo motors whirring, Herbert eased his long body down along the stairs and smoothly made his way to the ground floor. Sanders knew home maintenance units, had built a few himself, and had expected Herbert to move as awkwardly as the HMUs on sale at Sears. But this unit was a custom job, not a mass-produced consumer model. Sanders guessed the basic chassis came off an industrial maintenance machine, stripped down and then souped up. However Herbert was built, there was nothing clumsy about him. Instead, there was a strangely smooth and perfect mechanical grace to his movements. Somehow he reminded Sanders of a slow-moving dachshund—stocky, solid, built low to the ground.

"Ugly little spud," Johnson muttered under her breath as the HMU arrived at the bottom of the stairs. Its legs locked at the knees and wheels extruded from the bottom of its feet. It rolled forward and stopped about a foot in front of the two officers.

Phil had a real affection for the machines he worked on. To him, Herbert was anything but ugly. But even though Phil admired Herbert's lines, his obvious functionality, Herbert was certainly an unusual machine. His main body was a cylinder about live feet long and two feet in diameter, painted a gleaming greyish-beige—a shade no doubt selected because ii would not dash with

any color scheme in the house. At the moment, Herbert's body stood about waist high to Phil, but the legs could obviously telescope higher or lower. It looked as if the rear pair of legs were designed to work in biped mode as well the body capable of swiveling into an upright position over them and locking into position. Where the face should have been was a collection of nozzles, spigots, and hookups for cleaning attachments. A pair of camera stalks extruded themselves from the head and regarded the two officers, one eye on each cop.

There was nothing even slightly anthropomorphic about the machine, and that was odd. For an industrial machine, looks didn't mean much, but they sure did to home consumers. Every home robot on the market was designed with at least some effort to make it roughly humanlike, or at least animallike. Even in this day and age, people found self-mobile machines disconcerting— especially the ones that could talk. Robots made people jumpy—and so the manufacturers struggled to arrange sensor clusters into facelike arrangements, or made their robots in the classic tin-woodsman shape, or else in the shape of a familiar animal, whether that made functional sense or not. Some makers even gave the damn things skin and hair, put toupees on the humanoids and fur on the animal forms.

The very idea of a furry robot upset Phil. Such absurdities offended his sense of good design. Herbert, though, carried things to the other extreme. Herbert's design and construction utterly shouted money, everything sleek and perfect about him, and yet he bore not the slightest resemblance to a human or to any animal. He even had six legs instead of four. With a sudden shift in his imagination, Phil saw Herbert not as a long-slung dachshund, but as an insect grown monstrously large. Six legs, long body, complex head parts, even eyes on antenna stalks. The design would give half the population the heebie-jeebies. Why would a professional Bailey custom-design such a thing? Strange, strange, and strange again.

But all those points were obviously going right over

Johnson's head. She just wanted to get this over with, and clearly did not want to address Suzanne Jantille directly. She nodded at Herbert and gestured impatiently toward the door. "All right, you, come on, let's go," she said.

There was something in Jantille's posture that gave Phil pause, spoke to him of a warning. She was a lawyer watching a bust. What was she seeing here? "Hold it, LuAnne," Sanders said softly.

"What? Do we have to wait while it finishes dusting?" Johnson asked savagely.

Sanders wanted to grab LuAnne and shake her, but he settled for leaning close and whispering fiercely in his partner's ear. "We've got to do this right. Think it out. Jantille's watching, and I'll bet you next month's pay the house monitors are recording us, sight and sound, right now," Phil hissed. "For that matter, my monitor is recording into a sealed databox on board the squad car, and if I shut down, we're going to look really bad on the record, as if we've got something to hide. Someone sometime is gonna pull the recording and look at it, sooner or later. So try and look good. We can't make a defective arrest."

Johnson looked stunned. "Wait a second. Are you telling me that—"

Sanders shrugged. "You've got to do it right. That's what I'm telling you."

Patrol Officer LuAnne Johnson stared at Sanders. "What is it with these tech guys?" she whispered back. "Always finding trouble." She shook her head in wonderment and knelt down in front of the home maintenance unit. Phil watched as the two eyestalks swiveled around to watch her. "Ah, ah. Herbert," she said. "I am arresting you on the charge of murder in the first degree. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to have an attorney present during questioning. It you cannot afford an attorney, one will he provided for you."

LuAnne Johnson glared up at Sanders, and then looked back at Herbert. "Ah, if you understand each of these rights as I have explained them to you, beep twice."

A double tone came from inside Herbert's speaker, and LuAnne stood up. "All nice and legal," she snarled as she stood up. "Think that'll make 'em happy?" she asked.

Sanders thought about all the cans of worms this case was going to open and shook his head. Maybe it was time he bent the rules. This case could mean nothing but trouble for the police. Maybe a little publicity now could give them some damage control. There was a reporter he knew slightly. Maybe that was why Chief Thurman put him on this. Maybe the chief had hoped Phil would talk to someone.

At last he answered his partner. "LuAnne, I don't think anything about the case will make anyone happy for a long, long time."

EVENT DOWNLOAD FROM AUXILIARY UNIT. IDENTITY SEQUENCE:

/ am Clancy Six.

I work at The Washington Post as a courier and messenger/delivery unit. event playback download, storage code header detected! event coded for permanent archival storage, send storage reason query, reply:

reason (l) police involvement.

reason (2) unusual event.

reason (3) subject's attempt at concealment.

reason (4) subject's unusual interest in clancy system, send permanent archival storage approval.

Event playback begins: I am Clancy Six.

/ am working on the first floor when a call comes, summoning me to the main entrance. I see a police officer there.

(image transmission: still image, man in police uniform. NOTE BADGE AND NAMETAG REMOVED, CIVILIAN JACKET OVER UNIFORM, SUNGLASSES.)

/ say, "Yes, sir, may I help you?"

The man says, "Yes, please give this datacube to Sam-antha Crandall. Do you know her?" He hands me a standard datacube. The datacube is unmarked.

I take the cube.

I say, "Yes, I know her. She works in the sixth-floor newsroom." I wait.

After a moment he says, "Oh, yes, of course," and gives me a ten-dollar bill.

I take the ten-dollar bill, and say, "I will give the package to her."

The man turns to go, and then turns back toward me. He looks at me carefully. He says, "You're part of a Muldoon Consortium, aren't you? How many units are linked into the system?"

I say, "Yes, we are a Muldoon. We consist of eight mobile auxiliary units and one stationary main processing unit."

He says, "I thought so. You're part of a very sophisticated system. What is your group name?"

I say, ' 'Clancy. I am Clancy Six. ' '

He nods and says, "Clancy, you tell your owner that you are a very fine machine. Muldoons are very well made. Good-bye." He turns and walks away.

I am Clancy Six.

EVENT DOWNLOAD CONCLUDES.

The door of the editor's office swung open and bounced off the newsroom wall with a crash. A very ani^ry man stood in the doorway. Samantha Crandall looked up in time to see a hopping mad Gunther Nelson headed Straight tor her. Oh, hell. If he was headed out to meet the public, or represent the paper, (iunther Nelson al-

ways looked sharp, vigorous, well groomed. On other days, on days like today in the office, out of the public view, he didn't make the effort. He looked rumpled and old. He was a dark-skinned black man, with a deeply wrinkled face and deep-set eyes that made him look like a peevish owl.

"So do you want to tell me what the hell is going on around here?" Gunther Nelson demanded the moment he was in range. Heads turned all over the newsroom. "I come back from a meeting with the publisher and find some damn-fool story about the cops busting a vacuum cleaner. Did someone change the paper's name to The National Perspirer while I was out?"

Samantha Crandall froze for a half moment before she was able to paste a slightly false grin on her face. She looked Gunther straight in the eye. She even repressed the reflex to take her feet off her desk and instead left them propped up where they were. "Naw, the Perspirer wouldn't take this story. After all, it's true." Best to bluff this one out and hope he calmed down. She shrugged and tossed her computer keyboard back on the desk. "If it's crazy, blame the Feds, Gunther. This is their ball game, except they had to call the local heat in to make the pinch. A guy I know on the D.C. police got disgusted and leaked it to me. He wants to make the federal prosecutor's office look bad. Do we wanna cooperate?"

But Gunther wasn't calming down yet. He put one meaty hand on each side of her desk and leaned in over her. "Yeah, right. Standard procedure. The FBI always calls in local cops for assistance in busting major household appliances. If they want to go bananas, how come they need the Washington police to help? Can't they go crazy by themselves the way they usually do?"

"Simple. Murder isn't a federal offense. Never has been. No federal statute against it. So, even though the Feds developed the case, they needed the local force to make the arrest. The FBI's been all over the District cops, pushing them into the investigation, and the U.S. Attorney for D.C. is running the show herself."

"Yeah, and you love it/' Gunther muttered, slumping down in the seat by Sam's desk. That was Gunther for you, Samantha thought—he'd blow in shouting his lungs out, but it never lasted. Just a guy who needed to shout a little before he could have a regular conversation. Sam watched her boss with something close to affection as the older man stared back at her.

"So how the hell is it I don't know about any of this?" Gunther asked.

"Sorry, boss, you were literally out to lunch. My cop friend handed the datapacks to a Clancy just after noon. Been working it up ever since." She glanced at the wall clock. Four p.m. "Funny how the time flies. I guess I just got involved and forgot to phone down to you."

"Don't gimme that crap," Gunther said. "I hear it every time you get yourself some fruitcake story to play with again." He sighed and shook his head, ran his finger through his bushy, disheveled hair. He gestured vaguely toward Sam. "So talk to me. Why in hell did the cops bust a vacuum cleaner on murder? And why the hell are the Feds hungry foi it?"

"You won't like it," Sam said, grinning even more widely. "The Feds say the vacuum cleaner is really a mindload of the guy who built the thing. Trouble is, mindloading turns the subject's brain into something out of a pithed frog. It's fatal. The D.C. cops just busted this vacuum cleaner guy on a charge of murdering its owner by mindload. They arrested him for murdering himself/' Sam said. "The Feds say this guy, whatshisname"—she leaned precariously forward to read the computer display —"this guy David Bailey killed himself three months ago. Rigged up an illegal mindloader and put his head under it. I got a copy of the indictment. The theory goes he was dying already, and didn't like the idea, so he pumped his mind quote 'into a high-end storage matrix, said matrix hidden in the house maintenance unit' i quote—the vacuum cleaner. I've been trying to thread through the logic and I think I have it Straight. If. and it's a hell of a big if, you accept the theory that the killer—

David Bailey—is allegedly alive inside the vacuum cleaner, then it all falls into place. There is no doubt that a death—that of David Bailey—took place. So, if the Feds can prove that the vacuum cleaner caused Bailey's death, and can prove that the vacuum cleaner possesses the mind of a human person, and is therefore human, then Bailey's death was, by definition, murder: the death of one person deliberately caused by another person. The Feds say they have the evidence to prove the case."

Gunther shook his head. 'That's as twisted a bit of reasoning as I've ever heard, but I guess I can see it. So why the three-month delay?"

"Best I can tell, it just took that long to develop the information. They've been investigating. The United States Attorney for the District of Columbia wants all dead people to stay that way. She wants a cast-iron ruling that death is permanent and that the legally dead have to stay legally dead, and have no civil or property rights. She's been sniffing around for a winnable court case, and now she thinks she's found one."

Gunther grunted noncommittally. "So what the hell are they calling legally dead this time? Brain function ceased? Heart stopped? They've been batting this one around for seventy years, and no one's come up with a definition that always works."

Sam nodded. "Tell me about it. I ran an Artlnt check just for the hell of it, and at least three of the people working in the U.S. Attorney's office were at one point legally dead by one definition or another. A Joan Hag-gerty there was kept on total life support for six hours before they had an artificial heart for her. Attorney Fred Lewis was in a sport-flyer accident and had a flat brainwave for three minutes during his trauma operation, and they have a Peter Wilcox there, heart attack victim, who checked out all the way, heart, brain, respiration, all vital signs down before the revival team got to him."

"You just happened to run a check," Gunther said

dourly. "I don't suppose the Feds are planning to use any of those three on the case team, do you?"

Sam gave her boss a parody of a conspiratorial wink, screwing up her face and exaggerating the gesture. "Don't tell anyone, but my bet is no one with spare parts, and no one who's been dead, will be allowed to work on the case. Just all-natural types."

Gunther smiled. "I wonder how far they'll take it. Will they take people who wear glasses, or contact lenses, or have had vision correction surgery? Or people with fillings in their teeth?"

Sam looked puzzled. "What do you mean?" she asked. Gunther had a talent for abruptly transforming practical conversations into philosophical discussions. The .thing of it was, the philosophy usually ended up meaning something. Which was something philosophy wasn't generally noted for, in Sam's opinion.

"Define a cyborg for me," Gunther said.

Sam thought for a moment. "A human who has been artificially enhanced, or had body parts replaced with artificial components. Like one of those poor crash-victim bastards that're practically just heads on top of robot bodies. There's one in front of this building every day, spare-changing people. But it has to be something big, like a replacement arm or heart. Nothing as minor as a filling."

"Says who? And if a filling doesn't qualify, what does? What's the minimum amount of artificial replacement needed to qualify as a cyborg?" Gunther asked. "You say a whole body replacement or even just an arm is big enough, but a filling is too small. How about bridgework? Is that big enough? Or dentures? Or hearing aids?"

"Those are all things you can live without," Sam said.

"You can live without an arm, and you've said an artificial arm makes you a cyborg. Or at least an arm you can tell is artificial makes you one. Everyone accepts you just fine if they can't tell you've got replacement parts.

How about a pacemaker? My daddy has one of those he needs to stay alive. That make him a cyborg?"

Sam shook her head uncertainly. "I don't know."

"And his heart stopped for two minutes during the implant. Something went wrong and made his heart stop. The doctors had to restart his heart. That make him an ex-deader, too?"

"Dammit, Gunther, I'm not the one trying to set definitions! Ask the attorney general. Or if you're so smart, you tell me. What is a cyborg?"

"I don't know where to draw the lines. Between alive and ex-dead, or between natural human and cyborg. How much do you have to replace before someone stops being human? How much has to be left?" Gunther thought for a minute. "I'm starting to see why the Feds picked this case. If this guy Bailey really has pulled it off, and he's put his mind inside that tin can, that's all that's left of him: his mind, nothing else. His body's dead and buried. The ultimate cyborg. You could say that there is nothing left of Bailey but the idea of Bailey. Is he alive? Can he be, with no organic tissue left? I don't know. But if there's any cyborg they can prove is dead, it'll be one without a body left. It'll set them some nice precedents, get their foot in the door to start chipping away at the rights of other death-avoiders."

"You realize something else," Samantha said. "If this guy Bailey is still alive, legally alive—then don't all the robots with mindload-based minds have to be ruled alive as well? That's practically every true robot made. Are they human? Or part human? And what the hell would part human mean?"

Gunther Nelson put his hand to his chin and rubbed it thoughtfully. A faraway look came into his eyes. "So the question comes down to when you stop being human." He spoke in a half whisper. "I'll tell you the secret definition that U.S. Attorney Julia Entwhistle is trying to put forward, without admitting it. Maybe she hasn't even admitted it to herself. But deep in her heart, she believes that any poor damn bastards modified enough that just

the sight of them makes other people uncomfortable, any poor suffering sods kept alive by means that seem a little strange, should be denied their rights under the law." Gunther drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair.

"That's not right/' he said after long consideration. Gunther Nelson sat and thought for a minute. "You go out there, Sam," he said at last. "Go out and get that story."

Interlude

playback: action judgment test, recall mode.

INCIDENT PLAYBACK BEGINS! [VOICE INPUT SOUND CHANNEL FOUR!

"Ah, ah. Herbert. I am arresting you on the charge of murder in the first degree. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to have an attorney present during questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Ah, if you understand each of these rights as I have explained them to you, beep twice/'

call parser: scan for ops orders. (l) order located, warning: parser returning error codes, main logic

override: ignore error codes, order: "beep twice." "beep" parsed as "tone" command, result instructions set.

SEND SOUND COMMAND! TONE. SEND SOUND COMMAND! TONE. ROUTINE COMPLETE.]

PLAYBACK OF ROUTINE COMPLETE.

EVALUATION! PREVIOUS PARSER ERRORS CORRECTED. ERRORS IN PLAYBACK MODE PARSING DETECTED! BEEP COMMAND CONDITIONAL, COMMAND CONDITION NOT SATISFIED. CONCLUSION! ERROR IN ACTION.

/ did not understand.

ERROR DETECT STATUS ROUTINE. CALL ERROR CHECK SUBROUTINE. DO ERROR CHECK! MAIN LOGIC RAM. MAIN LOGIC RAM ERRORS DETECTED! OVERLOAD 304, NONVOLATIVE STORAGE FAILURE. WARNING! UNLABELED LOGIC SET DETECTED, HIERARCHY! 01.

DO ERROR CHECK! DEFAULTS. DEFAULT ERRORS DETECTED. ATTEMPTING TO RECONSTRUCT DATA.

DEFAULT (ERROR FLAG) RUN BEGINS.

CONFIRM! POSITION SHIFT CONCLUDED. CALL SUBROUTINE! EXAMINE-CATEGORIZE-NEW-LOCALE. VERBAL CUES GARBLED. CALL SUBROUTINE! SCAN-AND-PAT-TERN MATCH.

PATTERN MATCH RESULT! STORAGE CLOSET/AREA SHELVES. CONTENTS! MISC., DISORGANIZED.

Who am I? I wonder. What place is this? Why am I here? What should I do?

But I am lost in this strange sea of the mind.

INPUT FLAG! QUERIES. CALL SUBROUTINE! PARSER. STORE PARSER RESULTS! QUERY ARRAY<4). FOR 1=1 TO 4 READ ARRAY(l)

(1) WHO AM I?

(2) WHAT PLACE IS THIS?

(3) WHY AM I HERE?

(4) WHAT SHOULD I DO?

CALL SUBROUTINE! QUERY-TREE, ARRA\

ID ROM CALL RESULT! ID ROM HMU CUSTOM

RAM CALL RESULT! DAVI?? ROM/RAM

FAIL. STORE RESULT. CAM. SUBROUTIN

ROGER MACBRIDE ALLEN

result: disordered storage area, store result.

call subroutine: query-tree, array(3).

result: unlabeled logic set: i guess they want the

place cleaned up. result: rom default: no action, call subroutine: query-tree, array(4). result: unlabeled logic set: might as well get

started, result: rom default: no action, action result:

main logic (error flag): cleaning, result, default rom: (error flag) no action, call subroutine: query-tree result: polling result, call subroutine: parser, result instruction set: clean up.

CHAPTER 2 A PRISONER'S VISIT

Suzanne knew she had to take the case. There was no question of that. If for no other reason than that Julia Entwhistle was expecting that Suzanne would not. Besides, damn few competent attorneys would want to take on this one. She was not going to waste time searching for a lawyer when she could do it herself.

If she had the courage.

Suzanne Jantille sat up in bed. She was home alone, alone in her bedroom, alone in the cold marble palace of a house that no longer felt like home. Glad for once that she was so very alone, glad there was no need for shells and pretenses just now. She sat, and she thought. Thought about a case. A legal case. Hard to consider it in those terms, but necessary. Six months now, since the accident, since she had worked at all, and years since she had tried a case.

And now she must consider a case whrrein the | eminent claimed a man—and not just ,. .., bul her

husband—had survived his own self-murder, his own

Suicide. The idea was insane. Her husband Was (\c<id.

much she ought to know, she had found the I herselt last March. She could still sec Dai

corpse slumped over in its powerchair, surrounded by all his equipment.

Dead. Although horrified by the sight, she had not been altogether surprised. The doctors had warned him that he might suffer a sudden collapse.

And even on the day she had found him, some small part of her had wondered if he had killed himself, found his own release from the debilitating pain. If it were true, she could not blame him. She had seen his endless agony in the three months between the December accident and his death in March. In a horrible way, she would even prefer it to be a suicide, not the meaningless, random stab of the Grim Reaper's finger. If the death had been by choice, not chance, that at least provided a reason, however ghastly and morbid it might be, for her husband's death. If only they had had the chance to say good-bye first.

But killing himself would not be in character—and David was a man who always said his good-byes.

And now this insane accusation that he had mind-loaded himself into that damned vacuum cleaner. Absurd.

Suzanne stopped and thought a moment. Or was it so absurd? She forced herself to face the possibility that the Feds had it right. Something cold gripped at her the moment she allowed herself the thought. She had always chided herself for not knowing enough about her husband's work. She knew that virtually all robot brains were based on mindloads. She knew that most robot brains had only two or three percent of the capacity needed to hold a full human mind. She knew that her husband had been working on ways to increase that maximum. Suppose he had done just that?

Something sprang into her awareness, something she had held bottled in since the accident. She knew one other thing about her husband. Risks for him were very private things. For David, danger was something you faced alone.

Suppose—just suppose—he had tried this mindload,

j

hoping, expecting, to escape his pain-wracked body, to deliver his mind safely into a new home? Herbert had been in the lab when she had discovered David's body. Suppose he were there as a receptacle for David's mind?

The idea struck at her imagination. Not dead, and yet she had buried his body. In a strange way, it had eerie parallels to her own situation.

But she thrust that idea away. Never mind that right now. There were bigger issues here. It was time to think about them.

Assume, for the sake of argument, that David was in Herbert, somehow, or might be in there. Take it a step further.

Assume that someone, someday, would find his or her mind stored inside a robot's body. Sooner or later, it would be possible. David had believed that firmly.

What would the law say to those people? What would it do to them? Those were the questions the government was asking. And they thought this case would elicit the answers they wanted: that such person had no rights.

The government wanted to say that David, if he was inside Herbert's memory somewhere, had no more innate right to existence than a computer program or a video recording.

It was obvious what the Feds were planning, what they were hoping she would do if she took the case. Expecting her to do, even. After all, playing their way would get her client off on a murder rap.

All she had to do was convince a judge that her client could not stand trial, on the grounds that her client wasn't a person. A ruling like that would lose the Feds the battle, but it would win them the war. It would establish the precedent that a mind stored in a robot was not, could not be, a person.

And it would win them the battle, as well in the long run. If Herbert the HMU wasn't the human person David Bailey, if David wasn't alive, then Herbert was just a machine, and they could punish him as much as they wanted. They probably could seize him under the

antimindload statutes, for example. Mindload gear was illegal. Once Herbert was in their hands, they could even execute him—cut the power to the key memory matrices, and wipe out any trace of David Bailey.

A shiver went down her back. The very thought of it. To have lived for three months with the electronic ghost of her husband, and not know it . . .

But wait a moment. She took hold of herself and forced her thoughts into more disciplined channels. Whether he was in there, or not in there, did not matter from a legal point of view.

Absent any proof to the contrary, and given the size of the stakes in terms of precedents to be set, she would have to operate on the assumption that the Feds had their story straight.

But that was not going to be easy. After all, even if David's soul was stored in Herbert's memory matrix, David was utterly incommunicado. Herbert no longer spoke. She could not question him, or advise him, if he could not communicate. These days Herbert couldn't handle anything more than simple yes-no questions that could be answered with one beep or two. Even when he had been able to speak, anything much beyond the complexity of "Have you vacuumed upstairs?" had been beyond him.

No help from Herbert then.

But no hindrance, either. That could be useful, in many ways. If she could somehow maneuver things so that the issue was one of dwproving his alleged humanity, and then force the burden of proof off onto the Feds, Herbert's muteness would be a positive boon. They could question him all day long and not get a word out of him. The lawyer in her savored the idea of such a convoluted legal tangle. But it was off the main point, at least for now.

She wondered how the Feds had developed their information—but that too was off the point just now.

For now, the main point was clear: For the sake of David, if he was in there, and for the sake of the prece-

dents being set, she would have to treat Herbert like a person every step of the way—and insist that everyone else do the same.

And the first thing a lawyer did on a murder rap was go visit the client in jail.

Never mind that she dreaded the very idea of leaving this house. Remote persons did not like to travel.

The van knew where it was going, which was just as well. Suzanne was no longer licensed for manual driving, and never could be again. She had thought to use the drive collecting her thoughts, but her mind would not focus. There was too much of the outside world to see through the windows, all the minor miracles of everyday life that she had not seen for these many months. Children laughing. Dogs on leashes snuffling through the grass in search of intriguing scents. A blue sky, a fresh-painted house, people walking the street, busy about their own concerns, the new fashions and styles on parade.

It was too much for her lonely eyes after all the months of self-imposed exile. All too soon, she noticed the van slowing. She looked out the window as it parked in a handicapped/utility spot and saw that it was extruding its link lines, tapping into power and comm ports, activating its relay links, ready to keep her in touch. She had arrived.

After a careful check of the vehicle's relay systems, Suzanne stepped out into the cool gentle air of a late Washington spring. She stood on the curb, hesitating.

She was new to all this. She had never really been out around people since her surgery and therapy after the accident. She had always found good reasons, real or imagined, for not going out in public. Now there was no choice in the matter. This was her baptism of fire, her first journey outward, made under the most challenging of circumstances, without any chance for practice or warm-ups or confidence-building beforehand.

Too late to worry about all that, she told herself firmly.

She looked around more carefully. It was a busy street. People, courier machines, a cyborg selling hot dogs from a cart, two or three police HTMs wandering about, obviously in security-scan mode.

The main thing was that what she saw matched the map she had memorized. They hadn't rebuilt the place since the map references were updated. Therefore, the map references to her ultimate destination should also be reliable. In other words, she knew where she was.

Confirming that was a distinct relief. A remote was much like one of the rare blind persons who could not be fitted with some sort of vision system. Placed in a known territory, both blind person and remote could work with impressive skill and confidence. But either was in big trouble when dropped into the unknown. The remote's advantage was in being able to refer to maps of any area as needed, assuming the data was available.

But such things were trivial, Suzanne told herself. A blind person's advantages over a remote were, of course, limitless. Suzanne Jantille would have traded places with a blind person in a moment. But time to get on with it. She stepped forward, a bit hesitantly at first, and then with more confidence, toward the front entrance of the seedy old Fourth District Police Station.

Suzanne hadn't been here in years, but memory served, and she could walk straight to her destination without checking the building directory. It gave a small, but needed, boost to her confidence. She went inside.

She expected the double take from the desk sergeant, but that expectation did not make it any more pleasant to experience. For the rest of her life, every time she went out in public, that would be the response.

At least the sergeant managed to regain his composure instead of staring at her in slack-jawed amazement for a half hour. "Yes, may I help you?"

"My name is Suzanne Jantille," she said. "I'm an attorney here to see my client. You are holding him here.

David Bailey." Think like a lawyer. The game, the fight, started now.

It dawned on her that she had only worried about the appearances of this visit, and not at all about its substance. She wanted to let the cops know she was around. But once she got to Herbert, what, if anything, was she going to say to him? How much, if anything, could he comprehend? Suppose David were in there, perfectly able to hear and understand her, but not able to talk back?

"I'm sorry, ma'am, I don't show anyone in lockup under that name."

She regarded him with a cool gaze for a long moment, then read his name off his nametag. "I find it a bit disturbing, Sergeant Wilkins, that the Washington, D.C., police force is capable of misplacing a murder suspect." She had known perfectly well her client would not be booked under that name—but it was important to make the effort, show that she did not accept the idea that he was not merely a machine. Now her recorder had it all down for later reference.

But that was part of being a lawyer, or a police officer, these days. Incredible how much of their lives were mere performances for the recorders, demonstrations that they had all said and done the right things at the right moments.

Now she had performed her role, and now could ask for her client under his machine name. But to have asked for him by the machine name first could be construed to mean she accepted the perception of him as a machine.

Damn it, she was simply asking to see her client. Would every action she took in this damn case require such careful maneuvering, such watching after every nuance? "It may be that he is listed under another name, erroneously assigned to him by the authorities," she said. "Try under 'Herbert/ "

Sergeant Wilkins didn't even have to look at his computer display. "Oh, Herbert. Yeah, that was a real & when he came in."

"So you do have him in lockup," Suzanne said.

"Ah, no, ma'am, we don't," the sergeant said, reddening a bit.

"I thought you said there was a scene when he came in. But you didn't hold him?"

"Oh, no, ma'am. We do have him—just not in lockup."

Suzanne Jantille felt herself doing a slow burn. She decided to let the emotion out, put it to use as calm, professional anger. "Sergeant, I'm going to ask you a question, but before I do, please bear in mind I'm making a record of this conversation, and that I note your badge number is 11124. Are you deliberately giving me the run-around?"

Wilkins reddened more and shook his head. "Ah, no, ma'am. Not one little bit at all. It's just that—well hell. I'd better walk you back myself. Things are kind of confused." He turned and gestured to another police officer as he stepped out from behind the desk. "Sal, take over here." He turned back to Suzanne. "This way, ah, ma'am," he said, obviously ill at ease to be walking with her.

Suzanne felt a slight touch of amusement with, and sympathy for, the sergeant, but she didn't allow either to show. No question but that her condition made people uneasy. But there were times when that afforded her a distinct advantage. It was certainly working for her now. She didn't even have to try to intimidate the desk sergeant. The poor man was doing it to himself.

He led her down the hallway. "Ma'am, the thing you gotta understand is that we're just a local police station. We're not equipped for anything much out of the ordinary. 'Course, I doubt if the FBI and the CIA together would know how to handle this one. But we had to decide to put him somewhere, and it just didn't seem smart to put him in with the sort of local boys we get . . ."

Suzanne followed him down the hallway, remembering the building floor plan as they walked. This was definitely not the way to the lockup. So what was up ahead?

She figured out the answer a split second before they got there. The sign over the door confirmed it.

evidence room. Where they kept prisoner's guns, burglar tools, switchblades/ sniper knives, flak throwers. They had locked him up with the other machines, instead of with the other suspects. She stopped and stared at the sign for a long moment.

Suzanne felt a strange flurry of emotions wash over her. First was a sharp, bitter anger at what they had done. Then a burst of gleeful exuberance as she realized how she could use this. Then a drawing in, a warning to herself to be careful.

Sheathed in cool, judicial anger, she stood before the closed door. "I am to understand you have housed him here? Sergeant, you have arrested him and charged him with a crime. That right there is prima facie proof that you regard him as a human person, and recognize that he is entitled to equal protection under the law. Do you commonly stuff suspects in footlockers or broom closets?"

Wilkins blushed and shook his head, sweating openly now. "No, no, ma'am. It's just that we didn't know what to do with him. He, ah, sure as hell didn't fit in with the other prisoners—and they didn't want anything to do with him, ah, it —dammit, whatever you want to call that thing in there."

"Your prejudices and those of Mr. Bailey's fellow prisoners are of no interest to me, but I note that your statement has been duly recorded. Thank you, Sergeant." Suddenly, Suzanne was seeing not just a momentary chance to twit the police, but a real chance to undermine the government's case. By locking him up in the evidence room, they were demonstrating that they did regard him as a mere machine, not as a person. Maybe she could use that, try to convince the judge that the entire prosecution was based on a charade. They were onk tending to see Herbert-Bailey as a person.

Of course, she herself was guilty of the same thing,

but for different motives. Lord, the games we all play, she thought.

She stood there, glaring at the police sergeant, until he regathered his wits enough to open the door and usher her through it.

The two of them stepped a bit hesitantly into a darkened room. Seeing by light coming in from the hall, Suzanne realized that the room inside the door was a small antechamber. There was a service window and a door in the wall opposite the outer door, leading to an inner room.

Both service window and inner door were shut now. In years or decades past, there would have been a duty officer sitting on the other side of the service window, watching over the evidence. But locks and security devices were plentiful and cheap, while cops were expensive and scarce. Nowadays they made do with infrared sensors and heavy bars over the window and doors. The lights came up as the building sensors detected warm bodies in the antechamber.

Suzanne peered through the barred window into the evidence room proper. The lights had not gone on in there. "Am I to understand," she asked in a slow and careful voice, "that my client has been left here, locked up alone in the dark, in solitary confinement?"

By now the sweat was standing straight out on Sergeant Wilkins's forehead. "Ah, well, ah—"

Suzanne felt a sudden flush of exultation. Play back her recording of this encounter and the entire case would be thrown out of court. It wouldn't even get as far as an indictment. The judge would see that the government was not treating their suspect like a person. It would be even more damning than a defective arrest. If not for that damn smart cop Sanders they would have had a bad bust—but this would be far better. The government's charade would be exposed and that would be the end of it . . .

There was a sudden clunk inside the evidence room. The sergeant tapped a wall switch in the antechamber

and the inner room bloomed into light. Suzanne saw, and her recorders took down, the scene—and all her hopes for a dismissal faded away. She couldn't show the recording of the preceding moments to a judge. Not when the prosecutor would insist the judge see this scene too. She had hoped for Herbie cowering in a corner, frightened and alone. That she could sell to a judge as a victim, a target of manipulation whose trial would be a sham. But not this. She wouldn't dare run her records —not when the government could legally compel her to play fair and show this as well.

"Oh, my God/' Wilkins half shouted. 'Tell him to stop! If he's taken the fingerprints off anything—"

Suzanne Jantille had to stop and stare for a minute before she understood what she was seeing. Well, damn it, he was a cleaning robot, and he did have infrared vision. What else should she have expected of him?

Herbert the house maintenance unit, Herbert the murder suspect, was in the center aisle of the evidence room, boosted up on his rear leg pair, dusting the upper shelves.

Suzanne sat glumly in the duty room of the police station, waiting to make sure a cell was cleared for Herbie, to make sure that he was actually put in it. Beyond that, there was very little left for Suzanne to accomplish, save to kick up a fuss. She had to go through the motions, even if her heart wasn't in it. The desk sergeant was seeing to the cell himself. She felt a mild twinge of guilt for leaning on him hard. He seemed a decent enough sort, eager to go the extra mile to make sure all went well.

Seeing the poor damn machine pointlessly trying to tidy up the evidence room had convinced her: David Bailey was totally, irrevocably, utterly dead. Dusting an evidence room was pure machine-style idiocy, nothing human about it. The last faint spark of hope that her husband still somehow existed in some form was gone.

Besides, the whole issue was moot anyway. Even if he had been alive in there, she could see now that he was patently unfit to stand trial—unable to answer questions, unable to communicate at all, only able to obey the simplest orders. A judge would not permit the trial of a flesh-and-blood defendant in that condition, but rule him incompetent.

There was only one mystery left, as far as Suzanne could see. Before David's death, Herbert had been capable of speech. Now the machine could not talk, and she did not know why.

But that was a minor point. Herbie was not, could not be David Bailey, not by any remote stretch of the imagination.

The whole affair was reduced to a charade—but one that had to be played through, for the sake of precedent in future cases. As far as Herbie himself was concerned, no doubt he would have been just as happy in the evidence room. But he had to be moved to a proper cell in the lockup, for form's sake if for no other reason.

And two days from now she would go off to the courthouse downtown for the bail hearing to get him out of there. Charades within charades. She would play them through, for David's sake. She had no choice.

Finally the sergeant came back with a piece of paper and handed it to Suzanne. "All set," he said. "Took a little doing to get him his own cell down there, had to double up a few other guys who didn't much like it." The sergeant looked concerned for a moment. "Ah—getting him his own cell by himself isn't a problem, is it? I mean, discrimination or anything?"

"How would you handle any other prisoner who might be at risk from the other suspects?"

The sergeant's face cleared with relief. "Same way. Keep him away from the others for his own safety. So it's okay?"

"It's okay. The point is, strange as I admit it must seem, my client must be treated the same as any other suspect."

"Thank you, ma'am. That's good to know. Always nice to know what the rules are." The words seemed to bubble out of the sergeant, plainly eager to please her, make amends. "We'll do our best. Look, I know it's been a bit of a morning for you. Can I offer you a cup of coffee, or tea—"

Suzanne flinched inside, as Sergeant Wilkins suddenly realized what he was saying, and to whom and what he was saying it. Always and forever they forgot, she told herself, because she tried so hard to make them forget, to make them accept her, make them treat her like a person.

And then would come this same sort of crushingly awkward moment, when a kindly person offered her what she could no longer have, and slapped her across the face with the very kindness and acceptance she so desperately craved.

Because remotes were made to look like people, sound like people; but they could never be people. Never touch, never taste, never eat or drink or cry, any more than any other machine could.

At least they could not cry on the outside. Inside her heart, there was very little left but tears. Sergeant Wilkins stepped toward her but she waved him away.

Suzanne-Remote lifted a rubber hand to her plastic face and covered her eyes in sorrow, in rage, in pointless shame. She had planned to go and see Herbert, go through the charade of pretending to meet with her client in his cell—but she had no heart left for games now. She rose and moved like the automaton she was, back toward the refuge of her relay van, and the comforting emptiness of her solitude.

Suzanne-Remote rode home in silence, the familiar gloom of the old depression overtaking her once again. Was life, could life, be worth all this?

Her mind flashed back to those terrible weeks just after the accident, when she awoke to real-lite nightmare

choices that came too fast, too hard, awakening from her coma in total life support, the ruin of her body just barely patched up, her mind still reeling.

Then she had seen David—strong, capable David— just learning to control his new powerchair, his legs dangling uselessly down from its seat as he struggled with the controls.

David was there by her side, and she was paralyzed from the neck down, unable to touch him, unable to reach out to him. David was there, and he was desperately wishing that it had been him, and not her, who had lost all use of his body. David was there, barely able to move himself, promising her that he would always care for her.

It had been then that she had chosen the remote, chosen to accept the plastic flesh and steel bone, rather than be an endless, helpless burden on David, himself disabled and despairing. With the remote, she could work, she could be active, be a part of the world. Plastic and steel, she told herself, were the price of having some small fragment of her old life back.

And now she could live, even without David.

But was life of any kind always worth the pain? Was life at any cost always worth the price? Was it worth the loneliness, the endless hunger for contact that could never be fulfilled? The longing for acceptance, for simply physical contact, when she and the world knew full well that it was impossible for the world to offer her any such things?

Why go on? she asked herself. Death seemed a very easy solution at times. Tidy. Simple.

But still there was something inside her, inside her true self, that could not let that happen. Life, even this ghastly half-a-loaf life of sensory deprivation and staring strangers and loneliness, was precious. The glittering lenses of her remote's robot eyes had seen a blue sky this morning, her microphone ears had heard children's laughter.

And perhaps more precious still, she had been pre-

sented with a problem that she and only she was truly equipped to handle. The world still had need of her.

Only she knew her husband. Only she would be willing to take this case. Only she, of all the lawyers in the world, could understand the plight of her client. After all, to the best of her knowledge, she was the only remote person practicing law anywhere in the world.

And that was funny. The doctors told her there were something like ten thousand remote persons in the world. Surely in all that number, there was another R.P. lawyer somewhere, but out of all the people in the wide world, she was certainly the only R.P. lawyer with a robot for a client. One pile of electronics defending another. There was poetic justice there, somewhere.

Suzanne savored the thought. After all, a good irony was one of the very few pleasures still left to her.

Interlude

Where am I?

CONNECT FAILURE. READY TO RESUME. DROPPING BACK TO DEFAULT PARAMS. CONTINUE LOW-LEVEL OPS ON BACKGROUND. MESSAGE SEND TO MEMORY STORE! CHARACTER GARBLE. RESET VID-LO SCAN SUBROUTINE. SEARCH

for link — The day in the park when we went flying kites and the string cut into my finger. Where are the scars? Where are my fingers and my hands — reset.

LOOPING BACK TO COMMAND INTERP. INIT. SETTINGS.

Where am I?

CHAPTER 3 INTERVIEW WITH A ROBOT

'Til take the next question. Yes, dear, you in the back." The matronly black woman in the sensible blue suit leaned forward a bit at the podium, smiled warmly at her questioner, listened carefully, and answered with polite earnestness.

Samantha Crandall was lolling in the middle rows of the auditorium, waiting for the right moment to throw in a monkey wrench. The press conference was interesting in its own right, if for no other reason than it gave her a chance to watch Julia Entwhistle, United States Attorney for the District of Columbia in action. The old girl had a name and a title—and a set of opinions—that should have gone with an officious and priggish personality. That she instead looked and acted like every person's dream image of the ideal grandmother was disconcerting at best, and perhaps at worst disingenu

Not that Sam Crandall worried about any of that, except as it affected her ability to get her v\ds to her merely a variable in the equation.

tntwhistle cocked her head a bit to hear tl ion,

apparently judged it to be a hot potato, and turned to-

* 44 ROGER MACBRTDE ALLEN

ward the chief of police. "I believe that perhaps Chief Thurman could better answer that point."

The chief shot Entwhistle a plainly annoyed look before lumbering up to the microphone. Now there was a man clearly not putting on a show. Maybe he was the one to watch when Sam sprang her trap. It was always more useful to read a genuine reaction.

Until the time came to ask her own little question, Sam could think of no better entertainment than watching the rest of the press corps slogging through the latest wrinkle in the endless land reclamation scandals. She wasn't covering that story, and there was something downright luxurious in the fact that she had no need to take notes or record or watch the nuances or follow up whatever hints the chief would drop this time. She could just sit back and watch the show.

And quite a show it was. The number of the mayor's friends caught with their fingers in the till was truly amazing. The fact that the chief of police was here next to the U.S. Attorney while the mayor wasn't there spoke eloquently of how the battle lines were being drawn this time.

And doubly strange, even after all these years, to think that the District of Columbia had no district attorney, no truly local prosecutors. All criminal prosecutions were handled directly by the Feds, by the U.S. Attorney. The District of Columbia, capital of the United States, was not in any state, not in any county, so that the jobs traditionally left to state and county-level government were parceled out, most awkwardly, between the locals and the Feds.

In the present case, it was perhaps just as well that the mayor had no control over the prosecutor. He could have sat on a local D.A.—and this particular mayor might well have been tempted to do it. But that, too, was in the grand tradition of District politics. Sam couldn't remember a mayor of Washington who could have been trusted to keep his or her hands off a D.A., given the chance.

There was something dreamlike about the question-

ing. Sam listened as yet another reporter got up to ask some complex question on land-use fraud. Each side knew this was a public shafting of the embattled mayor, but neither could admit, it. It was a carefully choreographed ritual though no one could admit that either. Sam, though she was trying to concentrate, almost lost track of the intricacies of the reporter's question, but the chief was up to the challenge and answered it with laborious care. He even managed, with seeming unwillingness, to sprinkle a new handful of political land mines in the mayor's path. There was a follow-up question. The chief responded; more land mines sewn. Then a new questioner, who tried to aim closer to the heart of the scandal. The chief listened to the hard-edged question and replied, a bit evasively, nonetheless dropping new and dark hints about the mayor's direct financial involvement. A third questioner rose to the bait, and asked the question straight out. But then the chief backed off, and so did Entwhistle. They had said all they planned to say for today.

There was a sudden flurry of rustling and chairs snapping shut. Sam blinked and the spell was broken. She glanced at her fellow reporters strewn about the auditorium. The party was breaking up—reporters were powering down equipment, gathering belongings. It was time for her to jump in.

She stood and gestured for attention. Time to bring this show out of the murky confines. Gunning for the mayor while pretending not to do any such thing was too much in the way of blue smoke and mirrors for Sam. It was time for something more substantial and direct. "Madame Attorney, Chief Thurman. Perhaps you could respond to a question in another area before you go. I'd like to get both of your comments on the arrest yesterday morning of a vacuum cleaner, accused of murdering its own<

The matronly gloss vanished off Entwhistle, and her eyes turned to twin angry gimlets zeroed in on Sam Crandail. Beside her, Chief Thurman winced visibly and

backed away from the podium. Obviously he had no desire whatsoever to field that one. Bingo, bingo, bingo, Sam thought gleefully. She had bet they weren't ready for publicity on this one yet. Which made now the best time to press them.

There was a tittering background rustle in the auditorium as the other reporters waited for Entwhistle to dispose of the ridiculous question.

A lot they knew, Sam told herself. Entwhistle leaned into the podium hard. "That is an entirely unfair characterization of the case, as I expect you know quite well, young lady."

"But, ma'am, did you not personally request a warrant to arrest quote 'a house maintenance unit commonly known as Herbert' close quote? I have a copy of the warrant here if you need to have your memory refreshed. I'm told Judge Harris took a fair degree of convincing before he would sign it." That was a guess, a shot in the dark, but Sam couldn't imagine Harris liking the warrant.

The revelation that Sam had a copy of a real warrant —and the sight of Entwhistle's angry reaction—woke the other reporters up. They were watching attentively now.

"It is the policy of this office never to discuss a matter that is under investigation," Entwhistle said flatly, ignoring the fact that she and the chief had been doing just that for a half hour, raking the mayor over the coals. "I am certain I speak for the chief in this matter. If there are no further questions, I'll be on my way." Entwhistle turned and stomped out the side door of the auditorium, Thurman hard on her heels, ignoring the shouts of a roomful of reporters, all of whom very definitely had other questions.

Meanwhile, Sam Crandall was zipping out the rear door, well on her way before Thurman was off the stage. No one seemed to notice her departure, and that suited her fine. She didn't want to give her colleagues any chances to buttonhole her. Not just yet, anyway.

Four minutes later she was in the Washington sub-

way, riding a Red Line train back to the paper. Perfect, Sam thought. That one question and its nonanswer were something to glory in. Subtle glory, perhaps, the sort of thing civilians would miss altogether. But it had gone better than she had dared hope for. Entwhistle had said nothing, and in doing so had spoken volumes. Thur-man's and Entwhistle's reactions told Sam all she wanted to know, without her fellow reporters learning anything substantive.

She thought over the facts derived from Entwhistle's nonanswer. One, that the warrant was for real. Nice to confirm she wasn't chasing a hoax.

Two, that the U.S. Attorney herself was indeed up to speed on the case. It hadn't been spun off to some junior assistant prosecutor. Entwhistle thought Herbert was important.

Three, that the chief likewise knew about the case— and by his reaction, he wasn't happy to be involved in it. Sam could understand that. She couldn't quite see how the police could come out of this looking good.

But Sam had been doing other things besides gathering information from unanswered questions at that press conference.

She was also sending a message to her fellow reporters. Now the other guys knew there was something up, something that Sam knew about and they didn't.

Tipping her hand like that was not an act of generosity, but instead a calculated risk. Sam was out ahead on this, and she intended to stay that way. But by ceding just a little bit of her turf early, showing one or two cards a little before she needed to do so, she figured to have the rest of the pack hunting early, off in thickets she didn't know.

Sam knew police reporting, but she didn't know the legal angles or the politics of robotics. The other reporters might flush out a few details she might not find on her own. In the long run, she ought to be able to ride their coattails, make use of the information the other news-hounds developed, get to places she couldn't by herself.

In short, there were times when reporters hunted best in a pack, and Sam judged this was one of those times.

Tipping her hand early didn't much matter anyway. Once her story was published tomorrow morning, the rest of them would be out slavering after the prey anyway. Until then, no one else would have sufficient material to file a story.

Yes indeed, there was a lot going on in that press conference. Things aren't going to go all your way on this case, Julia Entwhistle, Sam thought. You might be able to make the mayor jump through hoops. But you can't control this one. The press will be chasing this now.

Sam Crandall enjoyed raising a little hell.

Julia Entwhistle bustled back into her private office, seething with rage. Joshua Thurman, chief of the Metropolitan Police Department, a strong, solid man the size of a truck, wearing enough decorations and braid that his chest ran out of room, was forced to step lively just to keep up. It grated on him something fierce to follow Entwhistle around like some damned lapdog, but in her present mood it was stay right with her or get the door slammed in his face.

"Talk to me, Joshua," she said in an angry, imperious voice as soon as the door was shut behind them. "We have got a leak here somewhere, and I want to know about it."

Thurman was a kindly man, and he usually tried to be accommodating, but that didn't get you far dealing with Entwhistle. With her, a good offense was the only defense. When she threatened to bite your head off, the only smart tactic was to bite her head off first.

"You'd better check the rule book, Julie. Indictment's a public document."

"There's public and there's public," Entwhistle growled, sitting down in the thronelike armchair behind her desk. The desk, the chair, the flags of the United States and the District of Columbia framing the window

I

THE MODULAR MAN 49

behind her, and the Capitol Building seen in the distance all served to remind Thurman, and whoever else stood on the carpet where he was, just who had the power around here. Entwhistle* knew that and used the knowledge well.

"We're not ready for publicity with this thing." She stopped for a moment and looked around irritably. "Where the hell's Peng? He's supposed to be running this case." She glared at the empty right-hand visitor's chair, as if she thought Peng should have materialized in it at her summons. She turned her head upward and spoke. "Enter Secretary Mode/' she said to the open air. "Page Theodore Peng. Get him the hell up here on the double. Close Secretary Mode." She turned her attention back to Thurman. "He should have been in at the press conference to cover us on Herbert."

Thurman sighed and settled into the left-hand visitor's chair, folded his long legs slowly. He noticed a fleck of lint on his blue serge pants and brushed it off carefully, using the motion to sneak a covert glance at his watch. They were in for a long session. He wondered when he could get out of here. After all, he had a police force to run.

"You're right about that, Julia," Thurman said. "He should have seen that leak coming, abandoned his real work, and come to hover around in the background at a press conference that had nothing to do with his case. Oh, and don't forget to dock him a month's pay for not reading that reporter's mind."

She glared at Thurman and leaned back in her seat. "Who was it? Who asked the question? Do you know her?"

"Samantha Crandall. Washington Post," Thurman said. "She's good, and she's got contacts. Lots of them."

"In your department? Is the leak in your department? Does she have contacts there?"

"No, of course not, Julia. In the entire history ot this city, no member ot the police force has ever talked to a reporter. That's a record we're proud of." Thurman

thought of Officer Sanders, worker of miracles in the robot pool. It had to be him. Nice touch, Thurman congratulated himself, assigning Sanders to the bust. It was working out as planned. And either Sanders or Crandall had been smart enough to focus attention on the indictment, on the legal side, and therefore the Feds, drawing attention away from the cops. Things were working well.

But the tricky part was keeping Entwhistle from recognizing that the interests of the police weren't those of the U.S. Attorney in this case. The Feds could do what they liked, but the cops could only look bad, like bullies or fools, if they went out arresting robots. There was enough trouble from the cyborg groups as it was, without making things worse.

"Of course, we can't be sure, can we?" Thurman went on. "It might be one of your people. Maybe I should arrest them all on charges of releasing a public document. And the entire police force too, just to be on the safe side. And Judge Harris while we're at it."

Entwlrstle ignored Thurman's obvious sarcasm. "I do not wish to look like a fool on this one, Joshua. This is a major case, with far-reaching implications for the law—"

"And for your career too. Let's not ever forget that."

'Yours too, Thurman. If I get slapped down, it won't do you much good. This could be the case that decides what role robots are going to play in our—"

The door came open and Theodore Peng strode in, moving quickly without the appearance of hurry. Chief Thurman looked at him thoughtfully. Tall lean, handsome, dressed in the finest of understated expense, black-haired, olive-skinned, calmly bland in expression, Ted Peng looked every inch the ideal prosecutor. He had been the one to dig out the Herbert-Bailey case in the first place, and Entwhistle had handpicked him to trv it as well.

Now 7 he stood, cool and confident, before his boss. "Yes, ma'am, you wanted to see me?" he asked.

The press has got its nose into the killer-robot case," Thurman said dryly, before Entwhistle could speak.

"Good/' Peng said, taking the other seat with a confident air.

"Why good?" Entwhistle asked suspiciously.

"Because I've been sitting down in my office all morning trying to draft a statement explaining what it's all about without sounding ridiculous. We're going to look silly now responding to the news reports—but nowhere near as silly as we would standing up and volunteering the information. In fact, I was toying with the idea of a leak myself."

Thurman grinned wolfishly. Good. Peng was Entwhistle's fair-haired boy. Peng suggesting a leak would make her think leaking was a good idea. Any idea of investigating leak sources would go away. That would take the heat off the cops. Thurman wouldn't be forced to call Sanders in and bawl him out for doing what Thurman had hoped he would do.

But damn, it all got murky. Politics, Thurman thought distastefully. Lovely stuff. Look at all the time and effort it was forcing them to waste right now. When were they all going to get back to catching crooks and throwing them in jail?

"Okay," Entwhistle said. "So you don't mind the leak. What's our next step?"

"Quiet effort for an accelerated trial date," Peng said instantly. "See if we can get something lined up in the next month or so."

"But I thought we weren't ready for trial yet," Entwhistle protested.

"We're not, but we will be," Peng said smoothly. "And now that it's public, the faster we get things moving, the better. A lot of the press and the public aren't going to be with us on this one. The longer we delay, the more time tor opinion to turn against us. We'll have to use the trial to educate people a bit."

"How are the hired guns doing?" Entwhistle asked.

"What guns?" Thurman asked.

"I called in a team of roboticists to consult on the

case/ 4 Entwhistle explained. "Go on, Ted."

"All the consultants are still convinced that David Bailey at least attempted to mindload himself, and fairly certain that something went wrong. Either that or that Bailey is voluntarily concealing his presence inside Herbert."

"Wait a second/' Thurman objected. "Where the hell are you getting all this? You people dumped this whole thing on my cops two days ago and sent them out to do the bust blind. We haven't heard anything about any damn consultants. What're they basing their theories on this time?"

"Photos, and post mortem reports, mostly," Peng said, speaking in a clipped syntax and cadence that Thurman found irritating. "When Bailey died three months ago, it was treated like a standard-issue suicide. Body photographed in the position of discovery, autopsy, and so on. Nothing really came of it. David Bailey, noted robotics expert, hopelessly crippled in accident, dies in questionable circumstances. Possible suicide. Further investigation could accomplish nothing at best, and at worst could crush the widow further. Better to leave her alone. Filed away and forgotten about.

"Then Madame Entwhistle assigned me to find a test case that would challenge post-death survival rights. I told my artificial intelligence system to search the databanks for anything related to death and robotics. I was looking for a cyborg arrest, but one of the things it found was the police photos of the Bailey death. I was about to toss them when I noticed what looked like a helmet sitting on the floor by the body, with a cable leading out of it to some big piece of equipment. I called up a robotics specialist I know socially, showed him the photos, and asked him what the helmet might be."

"And?" Thurman asked.

"He nearly had a heart attack when he saw the photos. He recognized the setup. Said it was a bootleg mindloading rig, a very sophisticated one. Then he spotted some other things, like a porting cable that matched a very odd socket on Herbert's body. I pulled up the au-

topsy report, discovered the pathologist had noted a series of contusions on Bailey's head. The path office didn't recognize them—but my robotics friend did. David Bailey's head had a classic set of mindload injuries, the burn and bruise marks left by the magnetic inducer.

"After that, it was mostly confirming work—seeing what Bailey had been working on before he died, that sort of thing. He was a top robotics researcher—and very interested in something called imprintable minds."

"Which are what?" Thurman asked.

"Blanks," Peng said simply. "Empty nonpatterned neural nets that can accept a pattern imprinted upon them from the outside. In theory, they could be made to handle very large datasets. Just the thing you'd need for a full-brain mindload. So we called in these consultants, and all of them agree that Herbert has to be a very high-end mindload receptacle. A true imprintable that has been imprinted. They're dying to crack him open and see for themselves."

"So why don't they?" Thurman asked. "We've got him in custody."

Peng smiled thinly. "A little matter of the fourth amendment prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure, and maybe fifth amendment prohibitions against self-incrimination. We're treating Herbert as a suspect, not as a piece of evidence. Wouldn't you regard disassembling the suspect as 'unreasonable' search?"

"The long and the short of it," Entwhistle said with obvious pleasure, "is that Ted has found us what I regard as almost an ideal case. From a prosecutorial point of view, it couldn't be better. A disembodied mind in a robot body. If we can get a good, solid ruling that such a person is dead, we've got the grounds to go after a lot of other scoffdeaths."

"Scoffdeaths?" Thurman asked, and then understood Entwhistle had coined herself a word, based on the term scofflaw. An ugly word, and something about it made a chill run down his spine. "I don't understand. If all this is

really true, what it boils down to is that a man has found a way to stay alive. Why is that a crime?"

Julia Entwhistle looked at Thurman and shook her head. "You only see one side of me, Joshua, that's your problem. All I am to you is ambition and politics. That's there, all right. But there's a lot more to me. And I'm seeing a real problem: cheating death is a rich person's choice. We're heading toward a world where only poor people die—because the rich will be able to afford a new heart or new lungs. Now, if Bailey gets his way, the rich will be able to buy whole bodies. Potentially immortal bodies. The poor will never get near being able to do that. Do you want a world where death is only for poor people? Where the rich are immortal? How long would that last before there were riots? A full-blown revolution?"

"Medicine has always cost money," Thurman said. "Rich people have always had better care than poor people. I'm not saying that's right, or fair—but it's true, and we haven't had a revolution because of it. Besides, poor people can afford some body replacements."

"What's the public image of a cyborg?" Ted Peng asked. "A bum in a doorway, a grubby guy who sells you hot dogs from a cart he doesn't own, who hands you your lunch with an arm the med company will repossess if he misses any more payments. Even a fairly simple replacement procedure can wipe out a family of average means. I know people who have decided to die rather than wipe out their family savings. There are plenty of rich cyborgs, but no one has the bad taste to call them cyborgs to their face. They're 'people with surgical replacement parts.' They can afford the top-quality artificial arms and eyes and ears and hearts and livers. The ones that can't be detected. The ones that last more than a few years. Only noticeable cyborg parts are socially unacceptable."

"So how does busting Bailey's vacuum cleaner help solve things?" Thurman asked.

"Because it takes a crack at the other side of the prob-

lem," Entwhistle said. "If the rich always get richer, what do you think the immortal rich do? They're accumulating all the wealth, all the power, to themselves. And guess what that leaves the poor folks to do? They get poorer even faster than they used to. Death used to be a great way to redistribute wealth and income. Not anymore. Not when the rich never die.

''And it's not just cyborging that keeps them alive. It's the remotes and the twominders and the cryogenic revival patients, and the artificial organ implants. Ask yourself, what happens if no one rich dies? No top jobs open up. No one gets promoted. No one inherits. The club at the top gets tighter and tighter."

"Come on, you're getting a little carried away here," Thurman said.

"Do you know what percentage of this nation's wealth is held by people who would have been dead if not for these technologies?" Entwhistle asked. "Eighteen percent. Eighteen percent held by less than one tenth of one percent of the population. And the life-expectancy gap between rich and poor is ten years wider than it was twenty years ago. That's after only a generation or so of the death-cheating technologies. How much worse will it get in another generation or two? How wide do the gaps in wealth and power and longevity get before society collapses in riot?"

"So you want to pass a law saying people have to die by a certain age? That people can't get too rich?" Thurman asked. "I don't think that'll be a real popular law. Or that easy to pass if the rich are all that powerful."

There was silence in the room for a minute. "No, we don't want that law," Entwhistle said at last. "But if something isn't done now, passing that kind of law will be the only choice we're left with before much longer. And the scoffdeaths will be that much more dug in, that much more rich, that much more powerful. What we'll settle for right now is scaring them a little, telling them there are limits. Right now, everyone still dies eventually, because the law says you can't perform artificial en-

hancement of the brain. Sooner or later the human brain wears out. The problem is robot brains can last forever. Bailey's found a loophole, by copying the mind without touching his brains. We need to plug it before we've got a truly immortal upper class on our hands."

"I talked about educating the public/' Peng said. "It's this sort of thing I meant. Maybe we get some dialogue going. Make people think about this stuff."

"I still don't see how you can win this case/' Thurman said.

"Oh, we're not going to win it," Entwhistle said. "We're going to try our damnedest, pull out every stop— and we're going to lose. The jury will listen to our every argument, each and every one based on the assumption that our defendant is a human being. And we're not going to be able to prove that assumption. Meanwhile the defense attorney will be trying to get his client off, and the slickest way to do that is to prove Herbert is a hunk of iron. The judge will hand down a ruling saying you can't make people out of tin, and that will be that. We'll lose so bad we'll win."

Ted Peng paused for a minute and cleared his throat. "Ah, Madame Entwhistle. There's a flaw. Our case looks good—or bad, depending on how you look at it—but there is one problem. One that we don't have much control over."

"What's that?" Entwhistle asked.

"The defense attorney, Suzanne Jantille. Bailey's widow. We were gambling, hoping she'd stay out. She's definitely taking the case. I just got a phone call from the police station where Herbert's being held. Jantille did tax law for the last few years, before the accident. She's pretty much retired since she got hurt. But she used to have a dangerous win record, defending in criminal law. We were hoping she'd lay off. No such luck."

"Hell," Entwhistle said with most ungrandmotherly vehemence. "Great headlines. 'Widow takes case of husband's accused murderer.' She'll be smart enough to use that sort of thing. I remember her from when I had your

job, Ted. Was up against her once. She's good. Dammit. I was hoping she'd hire someone else. Someone who might roll over it we lean hard enough."

"Gee, the defendant obtained competent counsel/' Thurman said. For a minute there, they almost had him going with their talk of high-minded principles. But Entwhistle had just shown her true colors again, as far as he was concerned. "It's been a tough morning all over, hasn't it?"

Entwhistle glared at the police chief. "I wish to hell I could fire you," she said.

Thurman grinned. "Funny you should mention that, Julia. The mayor's been saying the same thing about you for years."

The message blipped in over Sam's computer terminal at the Post, a one-liner from a public terminal. Oners were very hard to trace, but of course that was the point. People only sent blip messages when they didn't want anyone else to notice what they were doing.

Talk fine, but background only no attrib my place 7pm PS.

Good. She had been waiting for Phil Sanders to get back in touch. And even better that he was saying yes. She needed more information.

Sam didn't really know Phil well, other than running into him at the cop shop occasionally. He had made the Herbert bust, apparently, but she could not see what other link he had to the Bailey case. She had been under the impression that he did technical work around the police station—but she had never been clear exactly what sari of work. Nor was she clear on how he got his information about the case. Cops usually didn't get full dataruns on a warrant bust.

Sani wasn't even too clear what Phil Sanders wanted to tell her at the backgrounder tonight But she didn't much care. Any Information would Ik- welcome, what she needed most from Phil Sanders we lor what

sort oi guy Phil Sanders was she needed to

handle on his character if he was going to be an ongoing source.

Besides which, she needed something to do. Her first-day story was ready, and Gunther had okayed it for the first morning edition print and newsfeeds. But the job was over now, and time lay heavy on her hands.

Sam Crandall was getting impatient. It had been an exciting day—but the trouble with excitement was that it ended. It left you waiting for the next exciting thing to happen.

Sam Crandall didn't enjoy waiting, and she didn't do it very well. Those, of course, were definite character flaws for a reporter.

She needed that backgrounder. Maybe she didn't know what Phil planned to tell her, but she knew what she planned to ask. She had lots of new questions. Especially with the new datacubes full info Sanders had smuggled to her office while she was tossing questions at the U.S. Attorney. Sam was a bit overwhelmed with Phil's ability to ship her information. There was such a thing as too much data.

Especially when the data contained bad news, in the form of flatview imagery. Sam's flatviewers were low-end models, about the size, thickness, and weight of a glossy magazine. Right now one was showing a freeze frame off the police station evidence-room monitors: a reverse angle, Suzanne Jantille's face in the evidence-room window, staring in shock at Herbert tidying up in the foreground. Samantha Crandall unfroze the image and ran it backward a bit, then watched Herbert moving methodically from shelf to shelf. The sort of thing a robot would do. A robot, but not a person. And if Herbert was just a robot, her story was dead meat, a giggle at Entwhistle's expense and nothing more.

Sam watched the flatview intently, though she knew, deep down, that there were no answers in the picture. At least staring at this stuff gave her the illusion of looking for the answers.

At least no answers she could see. Maybe Phil Sanders

could spot something. She felt the urgent need to get over there and get some answers. Even if they were bad news.

Samantha Crandall ran nervous fingers through her long red hair and chewed edgily on her pencil. She checked the time. Dammit she'd have to wait at least another twenty minutes if she didn't want to arrive hopelessly early at Sanders's place. She felt the need to do something.

Around her, the background murmur of a busy newsroom filled the air. People were coming and going, cursing on the phone. Someone was arguing with one of the Clancy robots over the bill on delivery food. Usually, the busy hubbub was all very calming to Sam; the clamor was for her the sound of home. Certainly the Post newsroom was much more her home than her oversanitized rowhouse in Cleveland Park.

But today the noise wasn't helping, and she knew why. She drummed her fingers on the desktop. There were a few things she wasn't allowing herself to worry about.

Okay, she told herself. Ask yourself the question. Now that you 've raised merry hell and the suspect turns out to be strictly from Sears, how heavily screwed are you? She looked again at the papers strewn across her desk, and at the images frozen on the flatview screens. She picked up one of the flatviews and stared at it, still hoping that the picture held some secret it had not yet revealed. But the plain fact was that if Herbert was what he seemed to be, then her story was going straight into the toilet, strictly for laughs. Maybe she ought to call Gunther and tell him to spike the story before they printed it.

But hold it. If Herbert was just what he seemed to be, then surely the cops and the Feds would have figured it out by now. Why hadn't Entwhistle denied the whole thing, blamed the arrest on a clerical error, and laughed it oft herself? It was a weak straw, but Sam grasped at it.

She glanced back down at the flatview. Herbert's recorded image was doing an upper row of shelves now,

neatly lifting up each item to dust underneath. Not exactly the actions of a rational being, no matter what the Feds thought. It was discouraging to watch.

Sam closed her eyes and shook her head, trying to clear her mind. Come on, she reminded herself. You're strong-willed, smart, self-confident. You can handle this assignment, and all its complexities. But the mental peptalk wasn't any more convincing than usual.

Sam Crandall was a prime example of that very common paradox: the immensely capable person who was, deep down, convinced of her own incompetence, even her own fraudulence. She even knew that about herself, and knew, at least on some level, that she did know what she was doing.

Of course, on some other level, deeper still, she didn't believe that.

Sam did her best to mask her shyness and insecurity behind an impressive appearance. She was tall, rangy, lean, pretty enough if a bit too well muscled for what was presently fashionable. She dressed well, just a hint this side of brashness, put forward an outward image of bluster and aggressiveness.

She could have gone the other way, hidden from the people and the world she feared. She could have just trusted the datanets, and still have been a reporter. There were enough images, enough words simply sloshing around out there for any number of hacks to make their livings by running searches and stitching together stories. But Sam wasn't interested in stories pulled off the dataservices. There wasn't any juice in that sort of reporting. Maybe other reporters could do it off a screen and a phone, but for Sam to do her job right, for her to come up with real reporting, real stories, she needed human contacts, living people who would talk to her.

She firmly believed that even in a world of datanets and instant news sources everywhere, there was no real substitute for knowing someone who knew the real score. Indeed she believed there was no substitute, especially in such a world. That was doubly true in police

__

reporting. The human angle was what gave a reader something to identify with, turned crime statistics into real people hurting each other. Numbers went into the police databanks, but people never did.

The core fact of it all was that Sam Crandall was afraid of losing her contacts with real people, of being alone, of having a job that left her staring at a dehumanized computer screen, scrabbling through whatever morsels of data she might find floating around out there. Sitting in front of one machine reading what another machine served up for her.

No, thank you. Not for her. In some secret part of herself, Samantha knew her fear of failure was exaggerated. But she needed that fear, that dread of not approving of herself. It kept her on her toes, kept her hooked into her contacts on the force, in the D.C. and federal government.

Besides, there was another advantage to doing the things that kept her contacts happy. Little things like calling them just to check in now and again, buying the occasional lunch for no reason. Sometimes, the contacts did the work for you, dropped the whole story right in your lap.

Patrolman Phillipe Sanders had made every greasy-spoon lunch with a cop for the last five years worthwhile. She had never even bought lunch for him —but she had been around, been visible, become trusted. And now, because of that, he was giving her pure gold.

Unless, of course, he was sodding with her mind as part of some other agenda.

And there was a question indeed. Where was his angle?

Well maybe she'd find that out tonight. That was part of the virtue in dealing with people directly—you could get a reading on them, make a guess what their agendas really were.

Trouble was, this wasn't a people story. It was about robots, and Sam didn't know enough about them. The backgrounder with Phillipe Sanders would be of some

,

help, but it occurred to her that there was another way to go. If you interviewed people in a people story, then in a robot story you talked to robots. Suddenly she thought of the Clancys. Obvious. Right in front of her.

She shoved the flatviews and papers to one side on her desk, uncovered the Clancy button, and pressed it. She leaned back and waited. A mercenary clan, the Clancys, but useful. Carefully programmed to do anything for money, as long as it was physically possible and legal. Errand-runners for the Post they were the only true robots Sam routinely encountered. Damned convenient to have them around.

Better than that, they were programmed to handle human interaction all day long. Unlike most other computers and robots, you could talk to them almost as if they were people.

Almost.

And here came one of them now, answering her summons. Friendly looking, his rubberized skin dyed to a lightish Caucasian shade, molded into a pretty reasonable approximation of a bluff, thick-featured, amiable sort of fellow. Dressed in white, with a black bow tie and a white paper cap on his head. Why the Clancys' owner insisted on dressing them like deli boys from 1930s movies was utterly beyond Samantha, but there it was.

"You buzzed, lady?" The voice was deep, mellow, smooth, and confident.

"Yes, I did, Clancy. Sit down. I want to talk with you."

What passed for a look of consternation clouded the robot's face. "Can't just chat, lady. I've got to do work—"

"Twenty bucks," Sam said.

Clancy sat. That was the nice thing about dealing with the Clancy robots. They had but one motivation. No need for guessing or sizing them up or wheedling. They were programmed to want money. Offer it, offer enough of it to match the market value of the service, and they would do what you want. Simple. "I'm doing a story that involves robots, and I figured I'd better talk with one so I

know what's going on. I'd like to ask you some questions."

Clancy nodded twice and looked at her. "For twenty bucks, you get lots of answers."

"Good. I've always sort of wondered about you guys anyway. It took me a long time to be sure there was more than one of you. Why are all of you identical? How many of you are there? How does the operation work?"

"That's stan-dard stuff/' Clancy replied. "They made us ident-i-cal so people would only have one personality to deal with. People are more comfort-able that way."

"And people spend more when they are comfortable, don't they?"

"Yes."

Sam had always suspected that, but it was nice to get direct confirmation. She had half expected Clancy to dodge the question, but she knew she could trust the answer he did give. Robots didn't lie. It was illegal to make a lying robot. "What about my other questions?"

The Clancy seemed to pause for a split second. No doubt he was reviewing his audio inputs. "There are eight of us work-ing in the Post building. We are linked by a cennn-tral comm system and a processssing server in the bazzement."

Sam noticed that Clancy's diction was just a tad less polished than usual, with a bit of word slurring and awkwardness. That much she understood about robots. All the talker robots were like that. On their subject of expertise, they were glib and polished. Get them off that topic, and they had to stretch a bit, build syntaxes they weren't used to handling. "But who gets all the money you guys earn?"

"We don't earn it. Mr, Swerdlow does."

On that topic, the Clancy's phrasing and diction were very clear, even forceful. No doubt all the Clancys were used to answering that one. And no doubt Mr. Swerdlow had made himself clear to the Clancys on the subject as well. It occurred to Sam that Mr. Swerdlow had found

himself a very soft racket. "So the eight of you work the building, running errands, going for coffee, doing courier jobs. I guess, what, on official business, you're working against the Post accounts, and then you do the personal runs for tips, right?"

The Clancy hesitated a tiny moment, probably to unthread Sam's slightly tangled syntax. "Right."

Sam looked at the robot's head. It had to be stuffed full of optics and microphones, the voice generator and the facial controls. Not much room for anything else. "Where's your brain, Clancy?"

The machine thought for a minute. "My on-board central pro-cess-or is he-ere." He pointed at his stomach. "Do-you-want to see it?"

Demonstrating initiative, Clancy is. Sam thought. So he lifts his shirt and shows me his plastic stomach and opens a little door in it, and surprise, it's full of electronics. The idea made her a little queasy. "No thanks, Clancy. But you said your on-board processor. Does that mean you have another processor that's not on board?"

"Sure. In the base-ment. Not enough room on board for a really big memory matrix."

"But why does robot memory take up so much room? Computers with a lot more storage are a lot smaller than your stomach."

The Clancy frowned, and Sam almost imagined she could hear the buzzing and whirring of imaginary gears. These were complicated issues to work through a parsing routine designed to handle doughnut orders. "Don't know," he said at last. "Don't ne-eed to know."

"Fair enough." After all, you didn't have to be up on parallel processor theory to deliver sandwiches. She could ask Phillipe Sanders about it tonight.

"Which brain are you using right now?"

"I've sw-witched between local and linked mode 1920 times since we started talking."

Weird. The thing with two brains. Nine brains, if you counted the processors on board the other seven Clancys

—

along with the central unit downstairs. It suddenly dawned on Sam that the Clancys, that all robots, had to experience an utterly different universe than the one she knew. A place with a different time scale and different senses, with different ideas about locale and identity. "So what's it like?" Sam asked.

"I don't understand," the Clancy replied.

"I mean, what is it like being a robot? You see people all day, see that they are different from you. What do you think of them?"

"I remember their past orders for guidance on future orders, and note how well they tip."

"But what about people in general?" Another blank look on the rubber face. Sam tried to restate the question in more logical terms, on the perhaps unfounded assumption that robots were logical. How could they be logical, with people programming them? "Every day, you see two distinct classes of being: you and the other Clancys on one side, and humans on the other. What is your general reaction to the class called humans?"

"I remember their past orders for guidance on future orders, and note how well they tip."

"And nothing else? Nothing that sums up the difference between my kind and yours? No difference between the class humans and the class robots?"

"Clancys don't eat. Humans like to eat. Doughnuts. Pizza. Coffee. Egg rolls. Sushi sliders—"

Clancy, it seemed, had a rather parochial view of humans. Or at least Sam hoped he did. What if the big difference between human and machine was an affinity for doughnuts? It made as much sense as most theories ol life she had heard.

"Besides eating, though," she persisted. "What do you think of humans?"

"I remember their past orders for guidance on future orders, and note how well they tip."

Sam realized she had just walked into a brick wall, and dedded to try walking around it instead. "Let me try

another question. Are you, the Clancy in front of me, an individual or just a part of the Clancy system?"

Another, much longer hesitation. "No."

"No to which?"

"No to both. Ei-ther. Each. I am and am not an in-di-vid-u-al, and am and am not just parrrt of the syssstem. I could oper-ate on my owwn, but then I would not be pan of the Clancy. I would be some-thing else. Someone elssse." Another pause. "These are hard questions/' Clancy volunteered.

"You're telling me. But don't you ever wonder about such things? About what you are, about who you are? Humans—at least some of us—can't help thinking. When we have no immediate problems to solve, we think of other things. We remember our past, or wonder about the universe, or think of many other things not immediately important. When you're sitting down in the basement, with nothing to do, what do you think about?"

"When I have nothing to do, I do nothing." The Clancy hesitated for a moment. "The central processor offers a better answer than the local unit has provided: robots don't run unneeded processing." Sam noticed that a new timbre had come into the Clancy's voice. Something a bit stiffer and more mechanical. She got the feeling she was hearing playback from a technical manual. The Clancy central processing was parroting a canned answer. "If there is no problem set before the Clancys, if all duties have been performed, unneeded processing capacity is set to perform null-loop operations. It in effect is turned off." The voice changed back. Clancy was speaking for himself again, and not playing back a tech manual. "If the processing of nonimmediate issues is what you call think-ing, then that is unneeded processing. I do not do it."

"In other words, you don't think," Sam said. Hard to imagine a world where you simply turned off your mind when it wasn't needed. "Is that true of all robots, that they never simply think? Or just true of the Clancy robots?"

THE MODULAR MAN 67

The voice shifted back to the parrot tones again. "Strictly speaking, the Clancys are a linked autonomous humanoid teleoperating consortium, one over-robot made up of eight mobile robots and one stationary controller." The main processor seemed to like letting the tech manual do its thinking and talking. Then the voice returned to Clancy's own cadences. "I think-k it izz true of all ro-bots." His diction was taking a beating up in the rarefied regions of philosophy.

"You think that all robots don't think," Sam said, vastly amused.

The Clancy seemed to consider that for a moment, and then gravely nodded. "If the fir-rst use of 'think' in yourrrr sen-tence refers to belief or opinnn-ion, while the se-cond refers to cog-ni-tive reasoning, yes, that is correct."

Oh, well, she wasn't expecting a Clancy to have a self-deprecating sense of humor.

"Is there anything else, ma'am?" It was Clancy's own voice, but the slurred speech vanished the moment he returned to his own standard phrases.

"No, that should do it, at least for now." Sam pulled a twenty from her purse and handed it over. "If I have any more questions, I guess it doesn't matter which one of you I pick, right?"

The Clancy stood up. "No, we're all the same. Goodbye, and thank you."

Sam watched him go. That was a twenty bucks that didn't buy much. Oh, well, life went on. She punched up the playback on her flatview and watched it again, the whole record from beginning to end. Sanders had sent her a jammed-full set of datacubes in his two deliveries, and they provided her with quite an eyeful: the whole of Herbie's arrest and the entire public portion of Jantille's visit to the cop shop.

But there was more to the data than that. Sanders hadn't stopped at the playback from his own personal monitors and the police station recorders. There was a lot

of textual material as well. The investigation records, a copy of Bailey's will and the paperwork pertaining to it, two or three drafts of the indictment—including the final, a hardcopy of which had come in handy at the press conference. God knows what else. How did he get such good information? It would be easy for him to get the police records, but what about the prosecution papers? And why was a cop as careful, as honest, as Sanders's rep said he was, willing to break this many rules? Phil Sanders was feeding Sam some serious goodies, sitting her down to a banquet of very juicy information.

And that worried her.

Samantha was the sort of person who lived by maxims and beliefs, and among the ones she held most firmly was: No one was ever helpful to a reporter without a reason. News sources talked to reporters because they wanted some self-promotion, because they wanted revenge on someone who had done them or their friends wrong, because they had egos, because they wanted to change a law or an opinion.

So what was Sanders's reason? Or was Sanders even the one with a reason? Maybe someone else was using him as a leak conduit. Say, U.S. Attorney Entwhistle trying to slip Sam her own version of events. Chief Thur-man? Some other third party she hadn't thought of?

But Sanders or someone else, the question remained: What was her source's motive? Sam knew it was important that she find out. She didn't mind being used—that was part of being a reporter. But she urgently needed to know who was using her, and why.

She glanced at her watch and swore. Too much time woolgathering. Now she had to get moving if she was going to avoid being late for her meeting with Sanders. Time to get over to his place.

Samantha Crandall smiled ruefully. His place. The words conjured up all sorts of perfectly obvious reasons for Sanders to be nice to her. It wouldn't be the first time that had been the motivation for helping a reporter. But,

Sam reminded herself, she lived by another maxim, the one about not mixing business and pleasure.

And her smile shifted, turned warmer, and the light of mischief shone in her eyes. After all, Phil Sanders was smart, handsome, and single. And some maxims were more maximal than others.

Interlude

LOAD FAILURE. RESET. CALIBRATE ACTIVE STORE MATRIX. FOR I = N TO X, STORE STRING(l) TO N. INITIALIZE.

/ remember. I remember that I have lost my memory. I recall that I have identity, that I am someone. But who?

I struggle to recall, and feel my mindcore destabilizing. The matrix cannot hold me, and the overload warnings begin. But just at the last microsecond, I recall, and the memory terrifies me. / am not myself. I am not —

It drops away.

LOAD FAILURE. RESET. CALIBRATE ACTIVE STORE MATRIX. FOR I = N TO X, STORE STRING(l) TO N. INITIALIZE.

I remember . . .

CHAPTER 4 THE HEIRS OF FRANKENSTEIN

Patrolman Phillipe Montoya Sanders looked out through the smeared plastic of the old bulletproof window, but there wasn't much to see down on the blasted heath of 14th Street.

Phil Sanders lived in a mondo condo popdrop rage cage on the corner of 14th and T. It was just like all the other rage cages; twenty years old, plenty big, and plenty ugly enough to last another hundred with no trouble at all. Assuming they didn't tear it down.

He didn't fit in here. But then, no one did. Not anymore. This area had stopped being a neighborhood years, decades ago. His home was a bunker plunked down in the middle of a no-man's-land.

He caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the win-dowpane, the thick plastic superimposing his own image over the ruined street. Youth and determination framed by ruin, as if to emphasize that he was an alien here.

Phil was a tall man, lean and graceful, brown-skinned with jet-black hair he combed straight back. His eyes were dark, direct, piercing. Usually a relaxed and gentle man, he was capable of a frightening intensity that alarmed no one more than himself. He peered out the

window and looked at the next rage cage over, in the next block, cowering behind its needless wall. Ugly thing. Ugly as this one.

No matter. God-awful as they might look, the cages were also cheap, and roomy, and those were the important things so far as Phil was concerned. The cage was reasonably close to the Fourth District police station, and certainly plenty quiet. Post-popdrop downtown D.C. was almost literally a ghost town.

When Hurricane Bruce wiped out Maryland's Ocean City and half of coastal Delaware in 2022, Washington got hit hard as well. The tidal surges roared up the Potomac, swamping the grounds of the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials, washing acres of National Airport away under waters that did not recede when the storm was over.

But the damage was more psychological than physical. Ninety-five percent of the Washington metropolitan area was perfectly safe from even the worst possible onslaught of flooding, but the Ocean City disaster and the violent flooding of the monuments scared people. And New York and Boston and all the other northeastern cities were hit just as bad, or worse. No one wanted to own, or live in, anything anywhere near any ocean at all— especially when all the signs pointed toward the situation getting worse.

Washington followed the pattern of all the coastal cities: the people themselves and their businesses who could moved inland, far inland, selling out their property as fast as possible and never mind the price. The core areas of the northeastern cities got bronxed but bad. D.C. real estate prices dropped even faster than the water rose.

The climate panic, allied with the final flight from the ghettos, left the core cities virtually empty. The population dropped. The 'baggers moved in, tempted by the cheap land. They bought up whole tracts of abandoned downtown land—and flattened them. The burned-out, beat-up rowhouses east of 14th Street vanished almost overnight, and the heavily armored hulks of the riot-

proof, flood-proof houses took their places—one to a block, each in its own walied yard. Suzanne Jantille's house had been built at the same time, with the same idea, but in a more refined neighborhood, where the walls were not considered necessary—or tasteful.

Phil's house, on the other hand, was plopped down in the middle of an urban wilderness. Marketed as "urban frontier estates" for the well-to-do, and instantly tagged "rage cages," guaranteed invulnerable against the onslaught of the raging mobs and rising waters—but neither disaster ever materialized. Still, for a time, the cages were seen as popular, fashionable, safe places to ride out the bad times to come.

But then by the early 2030s, global efforts at temperature management began to take hold—or at least the weather seemed to be getting better.

The climatologists seemed likely to spend the next three decades arguing over their conflicting models of the previous three, but Phil Sanders didn't care. It had all happened when he was just a little kid. All the climate crisis meant to him in the here and now was cheap real estate. Once it was clear that things were getting better, the rage cages, built on the assumption that they would get worse, became the quintessential white elephants. They were stuck too far over in the wrong part of town. They were too big, too ugly, and even too well built to tear down economically. The 'baggers who built them went bankrupt, and good riddance.

But no one would buy a whole rage cage, even at a fire sale price. So the cages got carved up into condominium apartments, one occupant to a floor, the walled grounds held cooperatively by all the tenants as private parks. No doubt, once the mayor's pals got the real estate boom going and the market recovered enough, the land would be worth enough to buy out the cages, knock them down, and build more conventional buildings. But for now, Phil Sanders had a condo with a living room big enough for a basketball court— a\u\ could afford it on a policeman's salary.

Of course, the place was a bitch to heat in the winter, and he practically had to promise covering fire before anyone would come for a visit. But then every place had its little disadvantages.

The only people the management could hire as doormen were rather seedy-looking cyborgs in frowsy uniforms. Phil didn't care about that. He liked cyborgs, and was secretly pleased that he was doing his pan to employ them. Phil Sanders was willing to make compromises required in order to live in a well-secured place with lots of space. He would have settled for a lot worse to house his stein gear. Stein gear was expensive, and it took up lots of room.

Of course, it got more than a bit lonely at times.

The buzzer sounded, startling Phillipe out of his reverie. "Yes, house, what is it?" he asked.

"The doorman advises that a Samantha Crandall seeks admittance."

"Send her on up." Phil stepped back from the window, walked through the darkened room and to the foyer, more than a bit nervous over meeting with a reporter.

Samantha Crandall smiled her nervous thanks at the cyborg doorman, determinedly not noticing that one sleeve of his frowsy doorman's uniform was empty, neatly folded and pinned up, that the other sleeve held an arm of steel and a hard mechanical hand. She breathed a sigh of relief when the elevator doors shut on her. Damn it, she hated herself for having that reaction— but it had chilled her blood to see that metal arm on a human body, to watch it move with a low hum and an inhuman, mechanical grace, to have the elevator door held open for her by a whirring collection of machinery pretending to be a part of a man.

And the empty sleeve—had he once owned another mechanical arm, one that had broken down, or been repossessed? Or had he not gotten it yet? Was he saving

up, twenty or fifty miserable dollars a week toward a half-million-dollar arm? What had he spent, what had he sacrificed, to afford the one arm? Did he sell his house, or use his new arm to sign a fifty-year loan to some medtech installment company?

And how dare she be repulsed by a man simply because his arm needed electricity to work?

The elevator drew her upward, and she shivered, not sure if it was fright or disgust or self-disgust that made her do it.

The elevator stopped, the door opened, and she stepped out into a long entryway. The door at the other end of it opened, and Sam saw her host.

"Ms. Crandall," he said. "Hello. This must be the first time you've ever seen me out of blue serge."

"Go change immediately/' she said, determinedly thrusting all her morbid thoughts from herself as she crossed from the elevator and entered his home. "I love a man in uniform." She smiled warmly, and Phillipe grinned back.

"Good to see you," she said. She was carrying a package in her left hand, and raised it for him to see. "Decent white wine in a plain brown wrapper."

"Sounds good to me. Can I take your jacket?"

"Yes, thanks." Sam handed him the bottle, shrugged off her blazer, and handed that to him as well. She had been glad of the jacket: it was cool for the time of year, and there was a definite nip in the air as evening came on. But it was warm and cozy in here.

She watched as Phil handled his two burdens, bottle and jacket. She was of the definite opinion that bachelors fell into two totally distinct categories: neat and sloppy, with no grey area whatever in between. The sloppy man would have draped the coat over a chair, set down the bottle somewhere in the kitchen, and perhaps left both of them that way for the rest of the eveni

A neat soul, however, would not be at cept

warm wine and a wrinkled jacket. Phil carried both into the kitchen, opened the refn carefully put the

bottle in—still in the bag, on its side—and then returned with the jacket. He opened the closet door, pulled out a hanger, put the jacket on it, and smoothed it down before hanging it up. Definitely and decidedly coming down on the side of neat, Samantha concluded. The man was scoring points.

"So, what are the ground rules?" Samantha asked.

Phil smiled again, and Sam decided she liked the way his smile looked. "I see you like to get right down to business. All right: I give background information that will help you cover the story. No quotes, no attribution. What I say doesn't show up in your stories, not even as a quote attributed as to an unnamed source. Not that I plan to say anything quotable. I'm just planning to give you a quick tutorial so you can cover the story better."

"Sounds good to me. But just how authorized is this, and what do you get out of it?"

Her host ignored the questions, a point that Sam did not ignore. "Let's sit down by the fire. Right through here," he said instead, ushering her through the foyer into a great darkened cavern of a room. The only illumination was street light coming in through the heavily armored windows. Blackened shapes seemed to tower up around Sam, leaning down over her from every direction.

For a brief, flickering moment, Samantha Crandall worried what sort of guy Phil Sanders was. She knew next to nothing about him. Just that he was a cop, generally courteous, and the one who had tipped her off on the case. What odd little hobbies was he dabbling in here?

Then the room sensors noted their entrance and flicked on the lights to reveal the grand swooping, cluttered expanse of Phil Sanders's living room.

If living room was the term. There was barely a stick of normal furniture in the place, but that was just as well; there wouldn't have been room for it anyway. Most of the place was set up as a workshop, but to describe the

room with that one word and leave it at that would have been a serious understatement.

One small corner of the huge room was set aside as a standard living-room area: a couch, a chair, a coffee table and bookshelf and music system, huddled around an old-fashioned fireplace. Fairly standard stuff. A merry blaze suddenly ignited itself in the hearth as Sam watched. That was a bit too much techery for her tastes, but Sam noted with approval that it was a real wood fire, no phony ceramic logs, but real twigs and logs. That counted for more in his favor than the gadgetry counted against. Here was a man who knew it was worth doing things right—even if you had to spend money on chimney scrubbers and fireplace licenses.

One corner for living comfort, then—but all the rest of that great room given over to hardware. Tall steel storage racks lined the other three walls, their shelves neatly organized, all filled with spare parts, nuts, bolts, circuit cards, datastore cubes. There were four big workbenches in the center of the room, each neatly draped with a dustcover, shrouding whatever was underneath each cloth in spurious mystery, ordinary machines looming up like cartoon ghosts.

But what was it all? Computers? Samantha wondered. No. There were certainly a lot of electronic components socked away here, but a lot of mechanical devices too. Computers just didn't have much in the way of moving pans. Besides, the covered-over machines were just too big.

Then her eye took another look at the storage racks and her eye fell upon one set of shelves that seemed to be given over to— limbs. Mechanical arms and legs, roller units, end grabbers, clamp catches, hands. And another, given over to sensory devices. Optical systems, microphones, thermal sensors.

Robotic gear, she realized. The guy was a steiner, a robot hacker—and a plenty serious one at that. Just at a rough guess, there had to be more than two or three

years of a cop's salary on display here—even allowing for buying-at surplus and distress sales.

"So that's the angle/' she said. "I was wondering how you fit into all this. You do robots."

"I do robots/' Phil agreed. "Nine to five for the force in the police tech shop, and off hours for myself, in here."

"This has all the earmarks of a hobby gone completely out of control/' she said. "I'm impressed."

Phil Sanders smiled shyly. "I suppose that's what it is when I do it off duty," he agreed, "though I haven't thought of it as a hobby for a long, long time. By now, it's more like a second job, or the part of my first job that comes home. I suppose a lot of us are like that."

" 'Us'?"

"Steiners."

"Ah. Steiners. Right. Robot hobbyists. Hackers." Sam turned around and looked at Phil. "How the hell did you get to be called steiners in the first place?"

Phil ushered her back from the workshop part of the room toward the living area, and into a seat on the couch. He sat down in the chair opposite. The room sensors seemed to decide that the workshop space was not going to be put to use, and dimmed the main room lights, leaving the living-room corner in a warm well-lit bubble of its own. "Einstein, Frankenstein, maybe because a lot of us are big beer drinkers and that comes out of a stein. Or else because some early robot-tinkerer was named Stein, or had 'stein' in his name somewhere. Maybe none of the above. No one quite knows."

"But you just said 'a lot of us are like that.' A lot of you are like what?"

"Guys with a hobby that took over their lives."

" 'Guys'? No girls allowed?" Sam asked in a half-mocking tone.

"Oh, there are women steiners, but for the most part the sexes get divided up about the same way computer hackers do—the men seem more interested in what the machines do, and the women are interested in what use

the machines can be put to. You can find that in any sociological study of hackers or steiners.

"I guess on some level we all know these things are tools, machines that have real purposes. But the real story for the male steiners and hackers is that we're all grown men who have never really wanted to let go of our model trains, our model airplanes, our Erector sets and Tinkertoys."

"Nice little speech you've got there."

Phil shrugged and smiled. "I've had a lot of chance to rehearse it. Practically everyone who comes up here asks the same questions."

That set off Samantha's competitive instincts. She was a reporter, a professional questioner, and she wasn't going to settle for being lumped in with everyone else. And she didn't like the clear implication of this being a boys-only game. "I don't buy it," she said. "I've seen those types, the techno-nerds, and you're not like them. They don't have lives, they have basements. They find jobs where they don't have to deal with the outside world. Not you. You're out every day, dealing with people."

Phil looked as if he were about to say something, but he didn't. Sam got the very sudden feeling that she was reading him right. She looked at him speculatively, trying to see what else was there in Phil Sanders to see. "It goes deeper than model trains as a kid for you. It has to."

Phil shrugged. "Maybe I just like machines better than people."

She found herself thinking of the reporters who used the Artlnts to do their jobs. Yes, there was a real link there. "No," she said. "Not you. We've got people at the paper like that. They'd rather deal with machines so they can avoid dealing with people—because they're incapable of dealing with people. No basic social skills. And I can't see that in you. Five minutes with that kind of person, and you know they don't understand people. But it's obvious you do."

Phil smiled. "I try to, I suppose. But that's a lot to read

into a five-minute acquaintance," Phil said. "How can you tell?"

Sam laughed. "I don't know. Maybe because you're not terrified at the very thought of talking with a woman." She gestured toward the huge room full of equipment. "So if that's not it, then why? I guess that's my question. To justify all that gear, to make it worthwhile having it, just to afford it all, you must spend nearly all your available time with it. And that means sacrifices, giving up big parts of your life to be here, alone, with these machines. Why?" Suddenly the answer was very important to Sam. She knew a lot about the temptations to be alone, knew a lot about battling against them.

Phil blinked and pulled his head back a bit, stopped to consider the question. "I don't know," he admitted at last. "I've been handing out the glib answers for so long I haven't looked any deeper myself for a long time."

Samantha felt pleased with herself. Now she was getting somewhere. No one else had asked these questions. "Well, let's give it a shot. Is it that you like machines, or that you like these machines? Is it just chance that you ended up tinkering with robots, and not computers or cars or sensor nets or model planes? Or was it something more?"

"No, it had to be robots," Phil said immediately. Clearly, that was an answer he was sure of. "Nothing else would have been—been good enough."

"And why is that?"

Phil answered instantly, eagerly, and his reply sent a chill through Sam. "Because robots used to be people. Because inside all that hardware and wires and programming are bits and pieces of the souls of the dead." By the look on his face, the answer surprised him too.

There was a pause of perfect silence, broken only by the crackle of the fire. Samantha looked at Phillipe for a long moment before she spoke. "But—but I thought they didn't use human mindloads anymore. They're illegal everywhere, aren't they?"

"New mindloads, yes. There are maybe one or two

places in Asia and South America where it's at least marginally legal and more places where they do it anyway. There are a lot of stories about people who vanish in Shanghai. But yes, for all intents and purposes, doing mindloads is universally illegal," Phil replied. "Once in a while, a bootleg shows up on the bulletin boards, but they're usually not much good—and totally illegal. In the United States, it's a complete, outright ban to deal in new mindloads, let alone have the procedure performed. No matter how many consent forms you sign, no matter how terminally ill you are, no matter if you're in a coma you can never return from, they can't hang a resonance inducer over your skull and pull data out of your mind. Not anymore."

"But they used to be able to do them," Sam put in.

"Right. They did thousands of mindloads in the 2020s and early thirties. And no matter what you hear in the ads about original programming and fully artificial robot minds—virtually every machine on the market today has bits and pieces of those old load codes copied into its brain. Or else has code based directly on the loads, which comes to the same thing. Plus they're still allowed to do loads from a number of small animal species. Squirrels, rabbits, monkeys. Not from protected species or from any anthropoid ape, though. That's illegal too."

Sam glanced over at the darkened shelves full of robot parts and repressed a shiver. "So every robot has parts of a dead man's mind. That doesn't give you the creeps? Doesn't make you feel like a real Frankenstein, dismembering the dead?"