She winced a bit as she shifted her head and spoke the voice commands to activate her teleoperator helmet. Her voice was sore and raspy, but at least the swelling at her neck was gone. The induction sensors in the teleoperator helmet were able to pick up her commands to her nervous system a little better. Or perhaps she was learning how to operate her body in spite of poor signal reception. It didn't matter. She could function. That was the main thing. The helmet closed around her head, the miniature video screens came to life, she saw the world through the

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eye-cameras of her remote body. Another day began. Suzanne-Remote stepped out of her charge chair and looked about the room, barely taking time to glance at the huddled form on the bed. There was that moment when she felt the strangeness of looking at herself from the outside, but she firmly told herself she was too busy this morning to get caught up in her usual distractions.

Monday morning. So much to do. Seven o'clock now. The hearing would begin at ten, three hours from now. Were all her arguments ready? Had she covered all the bases? Part of her knew perfectly well that she was merely dithering, pointlessly worrying over things she had already done, fussing over jobs she had finished, focusing on things it was far too late to worry about. But somehow even that was comforting. It was part of her old pretrial ritual. Never in her life had she gone into court for a major appearance without having a briefcase of nerves first. Somehow it felt good to be back in her old rhythms, even the downside of them.

But then her bodies, both of them, robot and biological, were wracked by another fit of painful coughing, one that hurt enough that the pain reflex forced her robot body to double over.

That was strange, Suzanne thought. / felt both bodies that time. That was the first time that had happened since her first days of training to use the remote.

It was the pain, she realized. The pain was there always, reminding her of where her real self was, which vessel truly held her spirit and soul. Try as she might, she could no longer pretend, even for a moment, that the remote, the robot, was her real body. The pain forced her to acknowledge that much. Robots didn't feel pain, or get sick. She was a divided soul.

But this was no morning to concern herself with such things. There was work to do. She forced all her worries, professional and personal, from her mind, and got on with the day. Somehow, that made her awareness of her bio body recede a bit. She gave her bio-body its usual perfunctory morning care—tucking in the blankets,

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smoothing the sheets, checking a few of the feed lines. It was time for the things that truly concerned her this day.

Such as that bandit Swerdlow, the man who owned the Clancys. It had not been quite as easy as Sam had first thought to rent a Clancy, but ultimately, Swerdlow was motivated by the same thing as his robots. Once enough money changed hands, all was well. Suzanne had been forced to accept a one-year lease at a horrendous charge. Unfortunately, the Clancys were the only robots available that could be readily adapted to accepting out-of-body control. Once Swerdlow figured that one out, he knew he could name his price.

Now it didn't matter. That trouble was two days old, and over and done with. Of more immediate concern was the word she had received last night. The prosecution had notified her of its intention to file an unspecified motion this morning. In other words, they were gearing up to throw her a curve ball, and she had to get ready for it. She bustled down the hallway to her office and sat at her desk. There would barely be time to pick up her client—no, pick up Herbert—no, pick up her husband —at Phil Sanders's place beforehand.

Good God, her husband. David. If all went well, this would be the day she would first hear him speak, hear in his own words what it was like to be summoned back from the dead. He was coming back. That thought, that idea, should have glowed in her mind with the power of the sun, moon, and stars—and she had barely considered it. Instead she had only considered his words—or, if things broke the wrong way, the lack of them—as they would affect the proceedings in court. If he spoke, and was coherent, and could relate at least a few details of his life and death, provide even a little verisimilitude to the court, then Suzanne would have won this first battle. David would be proved human and the murder trial could proceed.

Nothing else mattered. How the judge would consider his words, that was the only equation that mattered, the

only issue that even entered her mind when she thought of her client.

It was overdetachment, preoccupation, of a very strange son indeed. In playing her mental game of courtroom chess, moving all the pieces around, trying to see the game from every angle, she had fallen into the trap of considering her own husband merely as a client, and then compounded her error by assigning her client to the role of a mere pawn, a game piece on the board.

Her own husband. Now, at last, that thought struck her with ail the power it deserved. Her husband. And he had yet to speak, yet to utter a single sound or demonstrate by any means at all that he was in there. Phil and Sam were still working, still even professing confidence of success, but Suzanne could read the hollowness in their voices even as they made their promises. The odds against their being ready in three hours were long and getting longer as the time grew short.

With another jolt, Suzanne realized she had not spent much thought on Phil and Sam either. Both had sacrificed, and struggled, on her behalf, and David's, and without both their help the situation would be hopeless.

She thought of them now: Phillipe Montoya Sanders, working almost around the clock all week and all weekend, Samantha Crandall at his side, helping as best she could. The two of them struggling heroically to get Herbert ready for Suzanne's Monday morning battle.

And yet Suzanne had never really considered how much that effort must have cost the two of them, the prices they had paid: Sam's editor, wary of conflict of interest, ordering Sam to turn her notes over to another reporter and telling her to stop filing stories on the case that should have made her career. Phil shrugging off a rather stiff warning from Chief Thurman to stay away from Suzanne and her case. According to Sam, the chief had made it clear that sticking with Herbert could d good whatsoever to his future career hopes, or even his current employment status. Instead of taking that hint, Phil took a week of his extensive accumulated lea.

He had all but locked himself in his workshop, buried himself in the intricacies of melding Herbert's circuitry with Clancy's.

But none of that had registered. Instead she had thought of legal tactics, courtroom strategy. Was she becoming so machinelike that all her emotions were fading away? Two people she barely knew were risking, perhaps destroying, their careers because they believed in her cause. That mattered. And she had never even said thank you to either of them. But it would be all right, she told herself. She would make it up to them, somehow. After it was all over.

"Circumstances," Julia Entwhistle said, "have changed."

"I know that!" Theodore Peng replied. "But this is still wrong, still underhanded. Let me get on with preparing for the case itself. Don't make me do this thing. It will demean Jantille—"

"We are not here to care for the psyches of opposing counsel," Entwhistle broke in.

"—and by extension, by getting our hands dirty, it will demean us, demean you and your office," Peng shot back.

"That is my problem, and this is my decision," Entwhistle snapped. "I did not call you in here at seven in the morning the day of a major hearing to ask your permission on this or anything else." She paused for a moment and then went on in a calmer tone. "Excuse me. I'm a bit on edge myself. I know you've got last-minute preparation to do, but in my judgment it was more important that I know you have accepted these instructions, and will pursue this motion vigorously. When we launched into this prosecution, we thought that we would be facing an unenthused lawyer representing a mute hunk of metal with no discernible human traits.

"We planned to force the case to trial up against someone who would hand us a precedent in a federal

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court establishing that robots can't be human. Someone who would inevitably blunder into a situation where the judge would have to rule that David Bailey was irrevocably dead and Herbert was a machine. That would be a ruling we could build on, something we could take into the next case, and the next one.

"Instead we are up against a seasoned, hard-edged professional trial lawyer. Even worse, if our information about what's going on at Sanders's place is reliable, we face a very real chance of going up against an articulate defendant who could conceivably put on a very good demonstration of being human. We can't do anything about the latter problem, but we can do something about the former one. I intend to have that something done, and you are going to do it." She picked up a paper from her desk and offered it to Peng. "I am giving you a direct order to make this motion and force Suzanne Jantille to withdraw from the case. No ifs, ands, or buts. Is that clear?"

Theodore Peng stared at the paper in her outstretched hand. He reached out for it, drew back, and finally took it. "Yes, ma'am, that's clear," he said. He stood there, holding the paper for a moment, trying to think of any orders he had disliked as much as these.

Samantha Crandall woke up next to the man she was falling in love with, and found herself amazed at just how unromantic a prospect that could be. They were here, together, because on her second night here they had been too tired to go through all the trouble and bother of making up the fold-out bed. That had set the tone for the rest of the nights. Last night, for example, she had collapsed into bed at four a.m., with Phil still hard at work as she fell asleep. They were working against a tight and unforgiving deadline, and sleeping together had been strictly a matter of convenience, not one of passion.

She looked at Phil, gently snoring next to her, and

smiled as she revised that estimate. No, they had had one night of love—or at least a half hour of love, two nights ago—or was it three—before they had both collapsed from exhaustion. The days had all faded into one long fog of work. But on the other hand, that lovemaking had been very nice indeed—no, better than nice, it had been wonderful. Maybe tonight—or tomorrow, after they both had time to rest, they could do it again. Maybe they could find the time to give their nascent love affair a proper start.

Be that as it may, a half hour's passion had been all they could manage so far. All the days, all the nights, had been dedicated to the maddeningly complex and delicate job of creating a link between Herbert and Clancy. She flexed her fingers and regarded them thoughtfully. She had proved herself a pretty fair hand at much of the intricate handwork involved—including the work that had to be done under a microscope. Assembling the artificial neuron chain modules had been the toughest part, at least for her. She thought of Herbert's inert body in the main room, its outer carapace completely removed, the hardware that had once been his mindload cable hookup now half-disassembled. Clancy Six was on the other table, in not much better shape. Phil and Suzanne had agreed it would be smart to remove Clancy's internal brain, to make it utterly incontrovertible that David, working through Herbert, was doing the thinking. That had been a job.

With a snort and a groan, Phil rolled over in bed. Sam had learned enough about him by now to know that was the first stage in his wake-up ritual. Ten minutes from now he'd wake up for real and be in search of coffee. She smiled and hopped out of bed, eager to have it ready for him when he woke.

But the wake-up rituals were a bit rushed and forced that morning. Days of time for the job had shrunk to hours, and would soon evaporate down into minutes.

Breakfast for the two of them was a single cup of coffee and an apple each, and that was virtually the last food in the house.

The passage of the last few days had worked changes on Phil and his home. Both man and condo had lost all sense of neatness and order. The kitchen was a mess, but the workroom outside was worse. Parts were strewn everywhere. Disassembled machines cannibalized for this part or that sat on all the benches, and the carefully sorted storage racks were a hodgepodge, their contents shuffled and rearranged repeatedly by the search for another gizmo or another gadget.

Sam took a good hard look at Phil as they sat at the kitchen table and drank their coffee in exhausted silence. He hadn't shaved in three days, and his eyes were bleary with exhaustion. He had showered every day, but even that rule was crumbling. This morning he had all but sprinted through the shower stall, barely giving himself a chance to get wet before he was out again, more interested in the water waking him up than getting him clean. She could see something in his face: he was not just committed to finding David inside Herbert—he was obsessed.

Sam was reminded of a story she had covered a few years before, when a little boy in California had been trapped in an improbable accident. His parents had left him alone in their stylish cliffside house, far remote from the city, and had headed into town for the evening. A freak rainstorm, a flash flood, and the house had simply fallen down the cliff in a mudslide.

The boy was buried alive under the house, under tons of mud. But by some miracle, the boy was caught in a corner of his room that did not collapse. Showing incredible presence of mind, he had used his toy walkie-talkie to call for help. By some further miracle, the Artlnt scan gear aboard the first police car on the scene picked up his call and alerted the cop in the car.

Almost immediately the house was the focus of a hu^e rescue effort, a scene indelibly marked into the memory of anyone who saw the live broadcasts that

went on for days. The mud-entombed, collapsed house, the frantic parents in tears, the heavy digging equipment, the worried engineers struggling to find a way to get to the boy without bringing the rest of the house down around him—all framed by a pounding, relentless rain that never let up. It had been five endless days before they got the boy out.

Sam remembered a face captured by the camera, the frantic, determined, sleepless, obsessed face of one of the rescuers at the scene. She did not have to look any further than Phil to see that same look again. But why?

Why did he care so much, and why was she along for the ride? Deep in her heart she knew part of the answer: Phil was here for his father who had been caught in the same trap as Suzanne, his father who might have ended up where David was now, if the technology had advanced just a bit further.

But why was she h<ere? For Phil? That was part of it, certainly. But it did not explain why she had handed off the biggest story of her life to another reporter and risked her career with scarcely a moment's hesitation. She was not the type to abandon her life for her man. She would not do it and Phil would not expect it. No, it was nothing as small or silly as that.

She was here because she cared too. Because all this was important, because it would decide things. But what things? And what outcome was she trying to produce? Trying to prevent the state from executing an innocent man, yes. But there was more, she knew that. More than she had ever taken the time to examine.

"I'm lost," Sam announced into the numbed silence of the kitchen, perhaps as much for something to say as anything else.

Phil looked up from his coffee in distracted puzzlement, as if he were surprised to see her there. "What do you mean?" he asked with poorly masked impatience.

"I mean I don't know why we're doing this anymore."

Phil gave her a puzzled look. "So that David Bailey

can appear in court, so that he can prove that he is alive, so he can't be tried for murder."

"But why the murder charges? I mean even Entwhistle knows that it's a crazy rap. It's a gobbledy-gook charge, a legal fiction."

Phil nodded tiredly. "What they really want is for a judge to tell them just that. Boom. That makes Herbert abandoned property, and illegal mindload equipment to boot. They impound his tin ass and melt him down to scrap. His real crime is in staying alive. That's why they want to bust him. They don't want people to survive their own deaths."

"Why the hell not?"

"I've thought about that," Phil said, "and I've read the arguments and the background in that datacube I swiped. It boils down to money. They teach you that in reporter's school, don't they? 'Follow the money'?"

"Yeah, but what money? Bailey was rich, but so what?"

"Not his money. Follow the pattern of money in our society. It's in the datacube. As a general rule, people tend to accumulate wealth throughout their working lives. After they retire, they live off the interest, or off the principal they've accumulated. They start to disperse what they've accumulated. When they die, the children split the proceeds, death taxes take a bite, and so on— virtually complete dispersal. It's actually fairly rare for a family fortune to hold together more than a generation or two. In the grand scheme of things, that's no bad thing. It redistributes the wealth a bit more evenly, and frees up capital, injects it back into the system instead of leaving it to molder in bank accounts."

Phil rubbed his bleary eyes. "But what would happen," he asked with a yawn, "if rich people never died, never got old or weak? Cyborgs were the first stage toward that. Remotes like Suzanne are the second. Herbert is something very like the third. Entwhistle is looking ahead to twenty years from now. By then, I bet I could lit a robot brain as good as Herbert's inside a standard-sized

robot body. Call that fourth stage. Maybe after that they'll even be able to do nerve endings, give back the sense of touch and smell and taste. That'll be fifth stage. A perfect human-replica robot body that never grows old, never dies, never wears out.

"But replica humans will have to be incredibly expensive," Phil went on. "Cyborging costs a lot, and so do remote units. Stage three, Herbert, costs even more. Bailey probably had twenty times the resources I have here, and even so he just barely managed to afford Herbert. I can see that in the engineering. He did the job well, did it right, but I can see a lot of things he did just to save money. Something has to be pretty pricey when a guy like Bailey is forced to watch the pennies. So what happens to society if we get to stage four or five? We're on the way there already, with no one but the rich being able to afford cyborging. Think about all the street cyborgs who've wiped themselves out trying to stay alive. They were the first victims. What happens next? Think it through," he told her.

Sam considered for a moment. "You end up with superrich immortals and poverty-stricken people who die." She made a face. "Brrr. It doesn't sound like a nice world to me."

Phil nodded. "No, it doesn't. And it's what Entwhistle and Peng are trying to stop before it can get started."

"And they think they can do that by getting a ruling that Bailey is dead? By impounding Herbert and killing him?"

"It would send a pretty powerful signal to anyone else who tried the same thing," Phil said with ghoulish humor. "The Feds want dead people to stay that way, to make sure there's room and wealth enough in the world for the living."

Sam shook her head in befuddlement. "It doesn't seem like such a bad thing to be striving for."

"It isn't," Phil agreed equitably.

"But we're fighting them! We're against what they're doing."

"And why's that?" Phil asked with a tired smile.

"Because it's good to be alive!" Sam said. "Because people have a right to live!"

"But do they have the right to survive death?" Phil asked. "That's the question here."

Suddenly a light came on in Sam's eye. "No it isn't," she said excitedly. "That's not the question at all. You said follow the money, Phil. Okay, then. Suppose we could change where that money goes?"

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"I'm not quite sure yet," she said. "Let me work on it. But from what you've said, Entwhistle doesn't care about dead people being alive. She just doesn't want them to have any money. Maybe there's an angle in there somewhere."

"Maybe," Phil said, clearly unconvinced. "But now it's time to get back to work." He stood up, refilled his coffee cup, and made his way out to the workroom.

Sam glanced up at the clock as she followed him: 7:45 a.m. She was suddenly reminded of college and the last cruel dregs of morning after pulling an all-nighter. The clock would tick down through those last few minutes between now and that eight a.m. class where the paper was due. There would come that ultimate moment where you would know whether you were going to make it or not. The sense of impending victory would pump one last dollop of adrenaline through your system, or the realization of defeat would snap down the last of your defenses. They weren't quite at that make or break point yet, but they were close.

Plan A had seen the job as almost childishly simple— just run a cable between two robots. Then there would have been time to run some real tests, to sit down and talk with David-Herbert-Clancy, David H.C. for short. Now all that was out the window. The job was far more complex than Phil had imagined. Neither Herbert nor Clancy were really designed tor this kind of thing, and Phil had burned up the last three days just trying to build the modifications that would let them talk to eat h other,

that would let David's mind in Herbert's overbrain run Clancy's body. Everything but that goal had been stripped away.

Just like college, Sam thought. You sat down at the beginning, planning to knock off the core ten-page paper in an hour or two and then spend the rest of your time making it beautiful pulling in the graphics and the illustrations and the bar charts to dazzle the prof. Then 7:45 a.m. rolled around and you were just praying he would settle for an eight-pager instead.

That's where they were right now. Phil was counting on a lot. He was planning on hitting the power switch and having David H.C. wake up at once, ready to go.

Suzanne shook her head. There wasn't any room left in the schedule for failure.

Wiring tests, alignment checks, double-checking the connections that could wreck the whole operation if they blew. Sam could do little but watch as Phil moved quickly but methodically through the last of the job. Sam glanced up at the clock for the hundredth time that morning. The few minutes remaining slid away, until there was not even time for success.

But at last the moment came. Phil set down his tools and looked up at Sam.

"I think we're ready," he said.

The two robots sat next to each other, Herbert lying lengthwise on his table, Clancy sitting on a tall stool facing him. A fifteen-foot cable snaked across the floor, from an ugly conglomeration of hardware bolted to Herbert's carapace into an ugly open hole at the back of Clancy's neck.

There was something distinctly ghoulish, disturbing, about the sight of that thick black cable snaking out of Clancy's too-human body, his blank expression and sandy, obviously artificial hair somehow making him seem realer rather than more artificial. Nothing that

looked like that could house a human spirit, and yet it was about to do just that.

There was something chilling about Clancy's patently false realism. Sam studied Phil's face as he leaned over the connections to Clancy's neck, checking them one last time. There was much there to see: rugged, unshaven exhaustion, courage, spirit, the experience of a half lifetime stamped on his features. There was a book that could be read, and understood. Clancy's face was nothing but blank pages, nothing more than a high-tech rubber doll. How narrow a chasm, how wide a gulf, Sam thought, between the simulation and the reality. Was that distance truly meant to be bridged?

"Here we go," Phil said at last, his voice excited. "That's the last connection." He looked at Sam and took a deep breath. "So let's knock on the door and see if anyone's home."

He reached into an access panel on Clancy's back and flicked a switch. There was a sort of quiver that pulsed through all his limbs, and his head twitched a bit. "Okay," Phil said, "that's power to him. Now Herbert." He stepped to the HMU robot and flicked a switch there as well.

There was another flicker of movement—and then a loud popping noise, and Clancy spasmed violently, falling off his stool and crashing to the floor in an inert sprawl.

"Jesus H. Christ!" Phil swore and cut the power to Herbert. He knelt by Clancy and cut his power as well. "The power convenor," he said. "The goddamned power convenor. I put it in backward. It doubled the signal voltage instead of halving it. Popped Clancy's circuit breakers."

"It's not serious?" Sam asked, hurrying over to kneel next to Phil.

"No, damn it. It's just stupid. A stupid fool mistake. I put the thing in at four in the morning. No wonder I made the mistake."

ill it take long for you to fix it/*"

"Long enough to wreck our chances/' he said bitterly. He let out a sigh and sat on the floor, leaning up against the workbench opposite Herbert. He stared up at the big robot and shook his head as Sam sat down next to him. "Damn it. If I had the chance to start over, I could do it so much better. I wouldn't need half the time or gear I've wasted just learning how it all worked."

"Wait a second," Sam said. "Say that again. What is it you're wishing for?"

"Something I won't get," Phil said distractedly as he looked over the damage. "A fresh start, a blank slate. A chance to let me start over again."

"That's it!" Sam said, swinging herself around to kneel in front of Phil and look into his eyes. "That's the thing I was looking for when you were talking about money. That's the solution, Phil. The way out of the trap Entwhistle's worried about. A way to protect society from immortality."

Phil looked at her oddly. "You want to maybe explain that?" he asked.

"Just a little while ago you were talking about what comes after David, that fourth and fifth stage stuff. Okay. Suppose, just suppose, instead of taking a replica human's life away, you took his money away instead? Wouldn't that solve the problem?"

"What? What the hell are you talking about?"

"Requiring mindloads like David to make a fresh start. We've made lots of pretty speeches about David being a changed person, a new person. Why not make that legally true? Declare the old person legally dead, let his or her will distribute the wealth. Allow the old person some maximum bequest—say, a year's minimal living expenses—to the new person, the old mind in the new body. The new person would get a new birth certificate, a new social security number, and so on. In the eyes of the law, one person would die and another would be born—or be mindloaded, or whatever you would call it.

"He or she would lose everything but that stipend, just as if the person had really died. Set it up so that if

you change bodies, you lose all your worldly goods. You have a chance to start over, to live. You have a shot at immortality, but not at infinite wealth. You'd have to find a new job, work out a new way of living, earn your own way."

Phil nodded slowly, and thought about it for a second. "That's not bad," he said, clearly impressed. "It would mean there was a real cost to body-hopping, a steep one, no matter how rich you were. No one would try dying for tax purposes. It needs refinement, a little tinkering to keep all the loopholes shut, but that's one hell of an idea. It ought to do the trick."

Sam stood up suddenly and started pacing. "I can see it," she said. "I can see it. It would work. Phil, what is there left to do here?"

Phil gestured helplessly. "I've got to reset Clancy's main bus circuit breakers, replace his power converter, and fire the system up again."

"Nothing I can really help you with?" Sam asked.

Phil shrugged. "Help me get Clancy back on the stool, and offer moral support. That's about it."

"Okay then." She knelt again and reached for Clancy's arm, and Phil scrambled to his feet and grabbed the other arm. It took some effort, but they got Clancy sitting up again. "There's that done, but your morale is going to have to function on its own," Sam said. "I've got to get across town to the paper and move on the Fresh Start idea now. Talk to Gunther about it."

"But why?"

"Because that's the nature of the news business. The world has a short attention span. Today, now, is the moment when the public's attention is focused on the issue of cyborgs and replica humans. Put an idea about them on the table now, and it might go somewhere. Wait a week, and they'll be worried about the next big crisis."

"So what are you going to do?"

"Talk to my editor, Gunther Nelson. First I find out if I still have a job. Then I pitch him on Fresh Start. See if I can get him interested." Sam was excited, the words

tumbling out of her. "Maybe he can swing a lead editorial on it, or get some of the broadcast and print commentators to talk about it. If we can launch it right, get it into public debate—"

Suddenly the door buzzer sounded.

"Damn it/' Phil said. "She's early and I'm not ready. Yes, house, what is it?"

"Madame Jantille has arrived. She is on her way up."

"Very good," Phil said, although it was no such thing. "Thank yo—" But then he caught himself in time. "You tell me what that one means," he said.

"What what means?" Sam asked.

"Saying thank you to the house. I've made it a rule in life not to be polite to machines. So what does it mean when I start being nice to them?" He grinned, and then walked over to the entrance area. He opened the door and saw Suzanne walking down the hallway from the elevator. He gestured her in without speaking and led her into the main room.

"How is he?" Suzanne asked the moment the door was shut behind her. No preamble, no hellos or good mornings. She was clearly too agitated for that.

"Not ready," Phil said, crossing his arms and leaning back against the workbench. "I screwed up. We tried a power test and I had a two-dollar component in the wrong way. Popped half Clancy's circuit breakers. I have to install a replacement and try it again. Fifteen minutes, an hour, tops, and I'll be able to power up the connection again. Then Til have to run some preliminary tests, make sure his motor function is there, that he can speak."

"It's nearly nine a.m. now, and the hearing is at ten. An hour from now is too late. You can't have him ready in time?" Suzanne asked.

Phil shook his head apologetically. "No."

The word hung heavy in the silent room, and Phil could not seem to look Suzanne in the eye.

"All right then, I won't take him this morning," Suzanne said, her voice brisk and efficient. "Can you have

him ready by one this afternoon, in time for the afternoon session?" she asked.

"This afternoon?" Phil asked, clearly startled by the question. "Well, yes. Given that amount of time, I could do it. But I thought it was this morning, do or die."

"It was," Suzanne said. "I know Judge Koenig. If we had stalled, or requested a delay of any kind, that would have all but destroyed our credibility with him. As it is, he's going to be watching like a hawk for us to try some sort of parlor trick." She gestured at the two inert robots, and the cable running between them. "And you have to admit, this looks like a parlor trick, a gimmick."

"And not a very slick one at that," Sam agreed under her breath.

"But the prosecution has given us a delay. They've asked to present some sort of motion this morning. So it's their fault, not mine."

"Won't they want Herbert there anyway?" Sam asked.

"Probably," Suzanne said. "But I'll do my best to bluff my way out of it." Somehow, some of the briskness faded out of her voice, and a softer tone found its way into her words. "But I was counting on being able to talk with David this morning."

"There isn't time," Phil said. "I'll need every minute I can get after we awaken him. If you can give me until one p.m., I'll use that time very well," he said. "But you should go now, or you'll be late for the morning session."

"But if you're that close to waking him—if it really could be fifteen minutes—I'll make a call, request a half-hour delay. I want to be here when my husband awakens," Suzanne said.

Phil looked at Suzanne and shook his head with a bone-weary sigh. "Take her in the kitchen, Sam. Explain it to her. Suzanne, you've given me three hours. With that I can make it. But I can't do it if you're here. Sam will explain it. I've got to get back to work."

Thanks for nothing, Phil, Sam thought. This was going

258 ROGER MACBRIDE ALLEN

to be one tricky conversation, to put it mildly. Before Suzanne could protest Sam ushered her into the kitchen, and shut the door behind her. As soon as the door was shut Sam made a beeline for the coffee. Not that she could even feel the caffeine anymore, but at least doing something with her hands gave her time to think. How the hell could she explain it all to Suzanne?

Sam poured herself a cup of coffee, resisted the reflex to offer Suzanne one, and gestured for Suzanne to sit down at the table. Sam sat down across from her, still not quite willing to speak. The room was quiet for a moment.

"So what is it?" Suzanne finally asked, breaking the silence. "Why can't I be here when my husband awakens?"

Samantha looked at her sadly and shook her head. "I don't think you understand, Suzanne. Phil doesn't even know if that is your husband anymore."

"What do you mean?" Suzanne asked with just a hint of something in her voice that made it plain she had worried on just this point. But how much had she figured out?

Sam gestured helplessly. "I don't know how to say this. I'm just so tired I can't think. God knows how Phil's doing it. We've been working on this around the clock for five days now—and Phil is carrying nearly all the load. All I can do is hand him the tools and hold things and run a few computer checks. He's the expert here. All this falls on him. But even so, I've gotten so deep inside this thing, so involved with it, I don't even know if I can explain it anymore. But let me try."

Sam took a sip of her coffee and winced. "Ugh. Too strong," she said. She rubbed her eyes and folded her hands on the table in front of her, then looked at Suzanne-Remote, straight in the eye. "Okay. Here it is. There is a mind in there, yes. But we don't know whose mind. We're calling it David H.C.—H.C. for Herbert Clancy—but that's just a label. We don't know who David H.C. will turn out to be. We don't know how strong his mind will be. After all, that mind has been through a lot.

It was pulled from its natural body, and then trapped inside an alien form for three months."

Sam bit her lip and then went on, launched into the worst part. "We don't know if the mind currently inside Herbert is even sane. Actually, after the literature checks on sensory deprivation I ran a few days ago, we're fairly certain David isn't sane right now, not by our standards."

Suzanne's head jerked back. "What are you saying?" she demanded. "That my husband, my client, is insane? Why have you waited this long to tell me?"

"Would you be sane?" Sam asked, a bit snappishly, her meager store of remaining patience suddenly gone. "After all those months trapped inside an alien body, unable to speak or act? With all due respect, Suzanne, you 're a little squirrelly, after a few months of much less severe sensory deprivation. Think how tough that has been. Imagine being forced to ride Suzanne-Remote, with no way to shut the robot body down, no way to control its actions—hell, no way to close your eyes. How long could you handle that?"

Sam waited, giving Suzanne a chance to answer, but the lawyer sat there, her face expressionless, and said nothing. At last Sam spoke again, in a far more gentle tone. "I'm sorry," she said. "That was unfair. It's just that I'm so bloody tired. Anyway. We can't assume David is sane now, but we think that he will become sane once the connection to Clancy's body is complete. It will be like pulling him out of a fugue state, literally plugging him back into the real world. We hope and believe that hooking Clancy's body into the system will pull David H.C. back, reground him in reality. And then he'll be okay."

Sam took another sip of coffee, and decided there was one other thing Suzanne had to know. "The trouble is, getting him back might take a while. He's been lost a long time. It might take a while to get back up to speed. We had hoped to awaken him Friday or Saturday, and work on cognitive reintegration, or whatever the hell Phil called it, over the weekend. The trouble is, we lost a

lot of time just making this hookup work. Everything else went out the window. But if I understand your strategy properly, even if he isn't quite all the way back at one p.m. this afternoon, that doesn't really matter, right?" she asked. "You just need him able to answer a few simple questions, demonstrate that his reasoning ability exceeds that of a robot's. Right?"

Suzanne nodded stiffly. "That's right. I just want him on the stand for a few minutes. I don't want to risk anything more than that."

"And even if he acts like a crazy person, instead of a crazy robot, that should be enough at least to hold us for the moment," Sam said, completely unaware of how callous her words were.

Suzanne blinked, seemed to be struggling to keep herself calm. "Yes, I suppose. With any luck, that would at least convince the judge that we deserve a bit more time to work with him some more."

"Good. Phil is ninety-nine percent certain he can give you that much," Sam said, knowing it was wildly optimistic to promise any such thing.

She took another sip of her coffee. "Maybe— maybe we can even do better. But no matter what, David H.C. is bound to be disoriented at first. He will be seeing the world through new eyes, speaking through a new voice. There will be lots of stressful and complicated information for him to deal with all at once. He might not even understand that he is dead. Some of his memories might be confused, or suppressed, or lost. His situation will be— delicate. If David H.C. is confronted with you . . ."

Suzanne shook her head, clearly confused.

Sam stopped and started over. "Okay, to be blunt, if he has forgotten the period since the accident you were both in—and if he is confronted with the confusing and disturbing sight of a robot speaking with the voice of his wife . . . Well, if he sees that while he is still disoriented —it could be very damaging to him. Perhaps throw him back into fugue." Sam looked straight at Suzanne, but inwardly she was cursing herself, hating that she be

forced to say such a cruel thing to a woman who had been through so much. We don't want you around. We're afraid the mere sight of you could drive your husband insane.

Suzanne seemed about to protest, but then she sat up straighter in her chair, and folded her hands stiffly, clearly determined not to reveal her emotions. At last she nodded. "Very well/' she said. "I suppose all you can do is your best, and I don't want to interfere with that." She shook her head worriedly, and Sam imagined her switching from wife to lawyer. "I must admit this doesn't make my job any easier. What you're telling me is that the first chance I'll have to talk to my client is when he's on the stand."

"Right now the alternative is not having him talk at all," Sam said. "That's not much comfort, but it's the best I can offer right now."

Suzanne nodded stiffly. "I'll call here the moment I'm out of court for the morning." And with that, she stood up, stepped out of the kitchen, back into the main room. Phil looked up from his work and caught her eye. "I understand now. I know how hard you've tried, you and Sam," Suzanne said. "I just want you to know that whatever happens, I appreciate that. Thank you," she said to Phil, offering him a thin, forced smile. He nodded to her, and she let Sam escort her out.

Phil heard the door shut and waited for Samantha to come back in. "Do you think she bought it?" he asked. "Did you satisfy her?"

"I think so. I explained the problem, why she shouldn't be here, and what the situation is, what David might be like when we switch him on."

Phil scratched his unshaved whiskers and grunted. "Of course, there's another problem, Sam," he said, staring at Herbert's motionless body. "I couldn't admit it in front of Suzanne, but I'm still not entirely sure this whole insane lash-up is goin^ to work."

Sam looked up at him with worried eyes and gave him a kiss on the cheek. "Don't think that way, Phil, or

ROGER MACBRIDE ALLEN

we're all going to be in big trouble. Gotta run. I'll see you at the courthouse."

Phillipe Montoya Sanders watched Samantha leave, and then turned back to David-Herbert-Clancy.

"Well/' he said to the one or the two or the three of them, "it looks like it's just you and me."

CHAPTER 15 ANSWER AS A MAN

Gunther Nelson stood by his desk, reading the words on the pages one last time. Without looking at his desk, he picked up a very old-fashioned clipboard from it and pulled a markup pencil from his pocket. He clipped the pages to the board and started working through the copy, marking it up, cutting it, tightening it.

Sam, sitting in the visitor's chair, breathed a sigh of relief. Gunther would not bother doing a markup on copy he didn't plan to use. "Wordy stuff here, Sam," he said. "Editorials have to be short, tight, right to the point. You can't write them top-down like a news story."

"Then you're going to run it," Sam said.

Gunther finished with the copy and tossed the clipboard back on his desk, where it landed with a clatter. "I can take your name off it and sign my name to it," he said. "Then I can submit it to the editorial page crowd, and they'll know you wrote it, but they'll have to pretend / wrote it. They'll monkey with it for a while, and then, if they decide to okay it, they'll take my name off and sign their names to it, and get the executive editor to Sign oil. Then he fools around with it if he feels like it, and takes everyone's names off it, and runs it. From then

on we pretend no one wrote it. And by that time that will almost be true. Probably every single word will have been changed. It might not say anything remotely like what you've written. That's the way editorials work around here."

"I know that, Gunther."

"And even if they run it, it's not going to change the world. No one's going to charge off and write new laws just because we say so. And even if they do, by the time the smoke clears the law might not say anything like what you say in this piece here."

"I know that too, Gunther. But it really doesn't matter. I almost don't care what the editorial says, or what the laws end up being."

"Then why come in here begging me to get behind you on this when I should be firing you for dropping out on a story?" Gunther asked.

"Because all I want is for people to start talking about it/' Sam said, her voice unusually soft and low. "I want people to think about rights for replica humans. The sooner they do that, the sooner a consensus will form on it."

"Suppose the consensus doesn't happen to agree with you?" Gunther asked gently, sitting down on the edge of his desk.

"I think it will," Samantha said. "I think people are pretty decent, when you get right down to it. They'll see that it's right for people to try and stay alive. They'll find some sort of way for that to happen."

"I wonder if it is right," Gunther said, almost to himself.

"What do you mean?" Sam asked.

"I mean I wonder—is it right to build a man out of Tinkertoys? A body from here, a mind from there, a memory from somewhere else? Plug him together and take him apart? What's next? Mix and match parts? A modular man? If you take him apart again, copy his mind into another brain, which part is the human? How

far down that road can we go with that sort of thing before the idea of a human being loses all its meaning?"

"I don't know, Gunther," Sam said. "I don't know if it's right, either. But we live in a world where it's possible, and that means we'd better face it." She stood up and gathered her belongings. "And maybe," she said, "it's not a question of what 'human being' means, but what it means to be a human being."

She looked at him, her face drawn and serious. Then something of her native spirit came to the surface again. She smiled and laughed. "God, I sound pompous when I'm tired. I'm going to court."

Phillipe Sanders checked the power circuits for the eighth time. He did not intend to make the same mistake twice. It was embarrassing to be tripped up by such a stupid error. Lurking at the back of his mind was a far more serious concern—what other mistakes had he made?

He stood and stared at Clancy, the robot's naked plastic body now closed up, all the access ports sealed. Clancy sat there like a mannequin waiting for the clothes to be hung on it. Was it going to work?

Phil rubbed his jaw worriedly. A backward power convener was no big deal but what other parts were in the wrong way? What other bugs were there in the communications routines he had written?

One way to find out, he thought. He reached out again, switched on Clancy, and then Herbert.

Again the faint twitches as power fed into the circuits —but smooth and quiet this time, no fuss, no loud noises.

Power reaches me, and this time it is not t Without any warning. I am caught up in a mush-rooming wilderness of sight and sound, a tang', sensory inputs that I can make no sense of. The weird al ns chase each other, but then

some process I cannot understand, they resolve themselves into coherent images. I can see and hear.

But then it hits me. I do not see through my own eyes. Instead I see myself, my body —Herbert's body — lying on a test stand or workbench of some kind, and somehow all the lights and colors seem overbright. Here and there tangles of inco-herency, of strange abstract spasms of light, drift through my vision. At last I realize that I am, at least in part, hallucinating. And yet much of what I see has the indelible stamp of reality. Not completely, not altogether, but I can distinguish reality from fantasy.

Where am I? Is this the place they brought me to last week? I want to look around, and an old reflex, unused since my death, causes me to turn my head hard to one side and see where I am. The images I see are a large room, yes, the one to which I was taken. And I see a man, a tired-looking man, a look of utter delight on his face.

Turn my head? Suddenly I forget my curiosity about the room and realize what I have done. I sit there, wherever, whoever, I am, completely stunned. It is the first voluntary motion I have made since I activated the mindloader. I look down — and see a body. A human — no, a humanoid body, with flesh-colored plastic skin. Are these my arms? Experimentally, I try to move my left arm a little — and it flaps out to its maximum extension, almost striking the man before he jumps out of the way.

He speaks, and his voice booms in my ears, so loud I cannot understand him. Suddenly I — feel? sense? hear? — a message from somewhere in the diagnostics of my new body.

SELF-CORRECTION ROUTINE ON REDUCE OVERALL

SENSORY POWER INPUT THIRTY DECIBELS. COMPLETE. SELF-CORRECTION ROUTINE OFF.

The overwhelming brightness of the room dims. I try to move my arm back and it moves slowly, smoothly. Suddenly the man's voice is clear, coherent. But even so, I cannot yet make out the words he is saying. I concentrate, focusing my attention, learning to hear through new ears.

"Id erkd. Id erkd. Ur ontrollng Clanky!"

SELF-CORRECTION ROUTINE ON SIGNAL PROCESSOR

REFINEMENT SYSTEM AUDIO. PHASE MODULATION OPTIMIZATION SEEK. COMPLETE. SELF-CORRECTION ROUTINE OFF.

I do not know if I willed the correction, or if this body did it by itself or if it responded to my reflexive attempt to hear better, but it does not matter. The words become clear.

"It worked. It worked! You're controlling Clancy!"

Clancy? Is that who I am now? I look down again, see my two legs. I see a cable, a thick cable, draped over my left shoulder. I turn my head and see it move. I trace it back the other way, across the floor, and into Herbert's body. I begin to understand.

"Let's try standing," the man says. He steps toward me. I reach out my arms and rest them on his shoulder. He grunts with the effort of helping me to my feet.

BALANCE SENSOR SHIFT TO UPRIGHT MODE.

But this time I barely notice the mechanical, reflexive voice inside me. Already it is fading into the background. The man steps back, and I let go my hold on him.

I am standing on two feet, controlling my own body I will my eyes to shut and they do. I will them open and see again. What a luxury that is for me, after so many months when I had no choice whether I could see or not.

I try to speak, to say what a wonder it is, but instead I make a noise like a foghorn fighting with a chicken — a cacophony of loud boomings and squawking. The man his hands over his ears. I wait for the inner voice to speak, and tell me it has corrected the problem, but it not come. And then I understand. Sjv un-

tary, und, <s control. I try again. The

sound is different, less harsh and terrible, but it is not speech.

"Are you trying to talk?" the man asks.

I nod my head, vaguely embarrassed to have failed at any more sophisticated communication.

"Okay, we'll work on that. But there isn't much time." The man glances at his watch, and then runs his fingers through his hair, upset and alarmed. "Sweet Jesus, there isn 't much time at all We have to get some clothes on you, on top of everything else. Why didn 't we think of that? We can 7 use your old delivery-boy outfit. Maybe there's something of mine that would fit you."

I am lost, disoriented. I sense that I have forgotten most of what I knew when I was powered down.

What is going on?

Courts of law, Suzanne reflected, are not what they are cracked up to be. The myth was that they were centers of quiet reflection, the places where problems were carefully adjudicated, the rights and wrongs balanced and judged with sober reflection. But whenever some chaotic case burst into the place, bubbling over with odd personalities and strange circumstances, someone would inevitably declaim that the place had turned into a circus.

That, Suzanne reflected, as she stood at the entrance to Judge Koenig's court, was a misconception; a circus atmosphere was a courtroom's natural state. It was the quiet, the sobriety, that were unnatural and rare.

How could it be otherwise, when you considered the sort of people who came into court? Thieves, charlatans, con men, hookers, liars and frauds, the unjustly accused and the villains posing as such, the aggrieved and hysterical victims, the angry litigants suing each other more out of a need for revenge than a desire for justice, all of them represented by a class of citizenry—trial lawyers—known for their love of theatrics, their aggressive natures, and the size of their egos.

More often than not the issue at hand was something outside the normal course of events, something so

strange, so baffling, so horrifying, so harmful or violent or passion-stimulating that it could not be dealt with within the everyday life pf society.

But even with that in mind, things were definitely a bit more out of hand today. The same crowd of cyborgs was here, adding more than their share to the noise— and, no doubt, to the aroma—in the courtroom. She could tell that much by the wrinkled-up noses of some of the court regulars, even if her remote was not equipped with a sense of smell. The reporters were there as well, brought out in double force by rumors of high drama in the offing. And the thrill-seekers were here too, courtroom aficionados, the ever-present oddities from the fringes of society who regarded trials as their prime source of entertainment. They tracked the judges and lawyers the way racetrack touts handicapped the ponies.

Everyone was here today.

Suzanne moved into the courtroom and made her way to the defense table. Judge Koenig was already at his bench, conferring with his clerk. He looked up when Suzanne arrived.

"Madame Jantille. I don't see your client with you."

Damn. That hadn't taken long. "No, Your Honor," she said as she arrived at the defense table and set down her attache case. She saw Ted Peng sitting at the prosecution table. He looked at her as she spoke, an odd sort of expression on his face.

Suzanne cleared her throat and spoke. "I was informed that this morning's session was to be given over to a prosecution motion. As I understand the current procedural rules, defendants are not required to attend pretrial motion sessions. He will be in court this afternoon."

"Hmmph. Suppose I ruled that he was required to attend this particular session?"

Suzanne took a deep breath. There wasn't much for it but to tell the truth—or at least some of it. "My client is somewhat indisposed. I'm afraid I don't know the t nical terms to explain his difficulty clearly, but I am as-

sured that he wall be here, in court, ready for you, at one

P.M."

"I see/' the judge said, obviously annoyed. "Madame Jantille, you have had almost a week's warning that this case was going to go forward this morning, and I have received no prior notice of a difficulty with your client. I don't like surprises or vanishing defendants. Do you have any reason that I shouldn't hold you in contempt?"

"Excuse me, Your Honor," Peng said, rising to his feet. "In light of the motion I am about to present, I don't know that a contempt citation would be—well—appropriate."

"Are you presuming to tell me my job, Mr. Peng?" to, sir, but I believe you might not feel the need for the citation after our motion is presented. I might add that the prosecution has no objection to the defendant's absence at this time. It might well turn out to be for the best."

"Indeed. Very well, Mr. Peng. You intrigue me. I will allow you to guide me in this for the moment. But bear in mind, Madame Jantille, if I do not agree with Mr. Peng, contempt still remains a possibility."

"I understand, Your Honor. Thank you."

"Very well then. If the clerk would formally call the case, we can proceed."

Suzanne, more than a bit unnerved, sat down at her desk as the clerk spoke the unheard words of legal ritual. Judge Koenig banged his gavel and called the court to order. "Very well, Mr. Peng. May we now know the nature of this motion?"

"Yes, Your Honor." Peng rose from his seat, carrying three copies of the motion. He delivered one to the bench, then came toward Suzanne at the defense table. He handed her the papers, and leaned in toward her.

There was something strange in his face, guilt, anger, perhaps even a flicker of shame. "I'm sorry," he said in a low voice. "This is not my choice. I do not like this motion, and I wish it could be otherwise. But I have been ordered to do this thing, and I must do it."

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"Madame Jantille's unfortunate disabilities do not outweigh her client's right to competent counsel. Nor do they outweigh the prosecution's right to a level playing field."

"What do you mean by that?" Koenig said. "It seems to me that you have all your arms and legs and are capable of many things of which Suzanne Jantille is not. Surely the advantages are all with you."

"No, sir. Not in a court of law. I am here, limited by my own memory and my own preparation, unable to receive real-time assistance either from a computer link or from a committee of experts tucked away in a back room. Suzanne Jantille is not here, and can, if she so chooses, have any number of such resources at her beck and call. Indeed, we have no real way of knowing that it is Suzanne Jantille operating that remote unit. She could cut herself out of the loop and hook another person into the remote link."

"Your Honor, I must object," Suzanne cried out. "Opposing counsel is questioning my integrity in the most scurrilous manner. He has no basis for such groundless accusations."

"Your Honor," Peng said, "that is most certainly true —if indeed it is Suzanne Jantille operating this remote. We cannot know that it is. Furthermore, Your Honor, granting her the right to represent this case by remote control would create a most dangerous precedent. How long would it be before lawyers with no disabilities, or even merely slight ones, claimed the right to use a remote, or a more conventional video link? How long before less scrupulous lawyers took advantage of the chance for real-time links to legal databases, or played switch-hitter tricks with a remote, bringing in substitutes to handle certain points in their cases? The potential for abuse of such technology is all but limitless."

"Your Honor, I renew and extend my objection," Suzanne said. "This motion in and of itself is an obvious piece of trickery on the part of the U.S. Attorney's office, a tacit admission that they no longer believe they can

bring this case to the conclusion they desire. They want to bring in a more malleable defense lawyer and cut their losses. This motion is not brought to prevent me from committing fraud, or to protect the legal system from a bad precedent. It is brought for one reason, and one reason only—to force me off the case."

Theodore Peng's face was utterly unreadable. "Though I might choose to contest Madame Jantille-Re-mote's accusation/' he said, "the reason for the motion does not matter, Your Honor. It is justifiable on its own merits. A moment ago Madame Jantille-Remote cited the rules governing courtroom procedures. As noted in the written motion, those same rules state flatly, in black and white, that all parties to a case must themselves be present or be represented by counsel present in court. There are no exceptions to that regulation, nor should there be."

Suzanne stared at Peng in amazement and he sat down and tried to compose himself, needlessly straightening the papers on his table. Blindsided. Utterly blind-sided. She had never seen it coming, and now Peng had given it to her right between the eyes. But Suzanne was not going to go down without a fight. "Your Honor, I must ask that you respond to my objections."

"They are overruled," the judge said, his voice and face both studies in bewilderment. "Mr. Peng's motion has an obvious factual basis. There is no denying that you are not here. Do you have any counterarguments to offer?" '

Suzanne opened her mouth and then closed it. She couldn't think of anything. Maybe if she had more time, maybe if she didn't feel so desperately ill, maybe if she was not so utterly confused by her circumstances, it would have been different. But she was drawing a blank. "Not at this time, Your Honor."

"I was very much afraid of that. The court will take a recess, and arrange with Madame Jantilk* and

brief a replacement counsel."

No! Something in Suzanne could not bear that Id

To surrender her case, her case, to some stranger, some wet-behind-the-ears kid, or some cheap shyster willing to take on a dead ugly case strictly for the money. She could not accept it. An idea popped into her head, an alternative. In a split second, the solution lay open before her.

But could she accept the alternative? It was a way to get past this obstacle, and maybe a way to go all the way, turn the tables. But was she up to it? Could she bear the humiliation? Did she even have the physical strength to survive it?

Maybe. Maybe not. But the hell with that too. She could not give this one up. "Just a moment, Your Honor. The prosecution has already stipulated my competence." She turned toward Peng. "Can I then understand that the only problem is with my not being physically present?"

"Ah, well, yes."

"Then, Your Honor, if I may request a recess to make the needed arrangements, this mountain will come to Mohammed." Steeling herself, launching the words with as steady a voice as she could, she spoke. "I will be here, in the flesh—or what's left of it—in time for the afternoon session."

There was a noise from the prosecution table, and Suzanne looked over at it. Peng was half out of his seat, ready to object, when it seemed to occur to him that he had nothing to say. It was his turn to look surprised, Suzanne thought.

Judge Koenig looked at her, rubbing his jaw. "Very well," he said. "That certainly would answer Mr. Peng's objection. But that will be an end to this. I'm telling both of you that. There will be no more of this skirmishing—at one p.m. we concentrate on the substantive issues of this case, and nothing else. No more theatrics. Is that understood?"

"Yes, Your Honor," the two lawyers said in unison. But Suzanne could not help but smile to herself. David would be here this afternoon—and his entrance, re-

vealing his changed appearance, would be nothing if not theatric.

"Very well/' the judge said. "Then this court is in recess until then." He slammed down the gavel and stood up.

Suzanne watched him go out, and then began to gather her belongings. She would have to rush home, call the technical nurse service, arrange transport, arrange a powerchair or powerbed here at the courtroom —a dozen things. But wait a moment—she was home. That damned Peng was right. She wasn't here. There was no need to bother with the ride home at all. And if they were going to accuse her of taking advantage of a remote, then she might as well do it.

She closed and locked her attache case, sat down, folded her hands, and shut herself off.

Theodore Peng watched the gavel come down, furious with himself for what he had done, angry with the judge for going along, and, somehow, angry at Suzanne as well for outsmarting them all. But no. That was wrong. It was Entwhistle that deserved his anger. Entwhistle and Ted Peng had done this, no one else. Accept that. If it left a bad taste in his mouth, there was no one else he could blame.

The courtroom spectators were making their way out, a noisy, busy group that seemed to make him feel more alone than he would have in a room full of silence. He watched them filing out, the cyborgs and the fringies and the everyday people. All of those people are against me, he realized. They all want me to lose. And maybe I want it too. He did? That was a strange thought for an assistant U.S. Attorney to have. It suddenly dawned on him that he wanted out. He had grown weary of this fight. This situation had gotten completely out of control.

He turned toward the defense table, feeling lost, feeling that he should say something.

He Stepped toward Suzanne, but she sat there, mo-

tionless, staring straight ahead. "Madame Jantille?" he asked, but there was no response. Suddenly, impulsively, he put his hand on her shoulder, but she did not react. He shook her. Still nothing.

At last he understood what had happened, and drew back from the metal and plastic thing that had been a person up until a few moments ago. She had gone home, escaped. Her spirit had withdrawn.

Theodore Peng felt a fresh upwelling of guilt on his soul. It was irrational, he knew that. But, standing there next to the body, Ted Peng felt something more than the thought that a machine had been switched off.

He felt as if Suzanne Jantille were dead, and he had killed her.

/ am on trial for my own murder. My wife is defending me. There is a plot of some sort to keep her from appearing, just now reported on the radio, but she will be there anyway. There is a woman named Sam, and the man's name is Phil. They are trying to save me, somehow.

The man, Phil, has told me a great deal that I don't really grasp. I struggle to hold the knowledge in, to know what is going on, but I am not here yet. I am not grounded in this reality. Seeing through my new eyes, through Clancy's eyes, my mind still confused and unfocused, landing in the middle of such complex urgency I am in a strange and brave new world, that has such people in it. I recognize the quote, but cannot recall where it came from, or how it got into my mind, or how accurate it is. But strange people, strange creatures there are, and I am one of the strangest.

I ride in Phil's van, and the streets hurtle past in a blur of motion. All is new, and untested, for me, and my grasp of reality is weak. What if I am mistaking reality for illusion, or warping reality into a false shape, and none of this is truly happening? What if this Phil is practicing some elabo-

rate deception upon me? What if there are events swirling about me, but I am misinterpreting them? What if this Phil is lying to me for some unknown reason?

A swirl of strange color flashes past my eyes again, the world distorts, collapses into geometric shapes and then reassembles itself. Clearly my senses are not yet fully functional. How can I trust them?

If all this is real, if I am interpreting events properly, the van hurtles down the road.

But perhaps nothing is, but what is not.

I have no way of knowing.

"I can't do it," the tech-nurse said, gesturing helplessly with his burly arms. "I can't. By rights you shouldn't even be running a remote. You're too sick. You're malnourished, dehydrated, in a state of nervous exhaustion. You're running a fever. If you don't get complete rest for at least—"

Suzanne gasped in pain and looked up from her powerbed. "It is now ten-thirty in the morning," she said in a raspy voice. In a strange way, it felt good not to disguise her sore throat anymore. If it were just a sore throat by this time. "I am going to be, I must be, in court, no later than one p.m. You are going to help me get there, and make arrangements at that end for a powerchair. If you help me, I will do whatever you want between now and then. I will eat, I will drink, I will rest."

"But—" the nurse began to protest, but Suzanne rolled right over him.

"If you do not help me, I will call another nursing outfit, and then another, and then another, until I find one that will help me. If all else fails, I will call a cab, and get to court that way. Or I will call the judge, inform him that I am being prevented from appearing. Perhaps he will issue you a court order requiring you to deliver me. Perhaps he will send a bailiff to collect me. I don't care how it happens, but / am going to court. It I have to go it

the hard way, I will not have time to rest, or eat, and I will be in worse shape than I am now."

The tech-nurse looked most unhappy, but did not speak. She had him weakening, Suzanne thought. All he needed was one more little push. "I'll cooperate with you now," she said in as gentle a voice as she could manage, "if you help me later. Do we have a deal?"

There was another moment's silence, but at last the man spoke. "A powerbed," he said at last. "You're too far gone to handle a chair."

"Fine, fine," she said, slumping back into her bed, suddenly limp with relief. "You've got yourself a deal." What a tiny victory, she thought. But perhaps tiny victories were all that was left to her.

"All right then," the nurse said. "But I'm getting you something to eat right now, or else I'm not helping you go anywhere."

Sam Crandall pulled her paycard out of the slot on the autocab and jumped out into chaos. The plaza in front of the courthouse was a madhouse, blanketed with news reporters, protesters with pickets, spectators, knots of people listening to impromptu speeches and debates, speakers and preachers trying to whip up audiences, proclaiming this or that radical position. All of them mixed in with the usual lunchtime crowds of office workers having a bite to eat outside. The hot dog vendors and ice cream sellers were doing a booming business, and there seemed to be a group of cyborgs in red T-shirts, circulating some sort of petition.

She had never seen the plaza this tumultuous. How had it all gotten this out of control so fast? It didn't matter. She checked the time again and swore. She wasn't late, but she was cutting it close. Phil was supposed to meet her here. Where was he? She shouldered her way through the crowd into the building, flashing her press pass to get past security. Security. They'd know if Phil

was here. Was there anyone she knew? There, Smitty. He'd help her out.

She hurried through the surging crowd in the lobby and buttonholed the elderly guard leaning on the side of his booth. "Hey, Smitty, how you doing?"

"Hey, Sam, you here for the show like everyone else?"

"Sort of, Smitty. But I'm not covering the case. I'm supposed to be meeting a friend, a cop named Phil Sanders. He's doing some work off duty, transporting some gear for the defense. He probably had to check in—"

"Okay, lemme check." Smitty leaned close over his computer terminal and muttered at it for a minute. "Yeah, he's here," Smitty said. "Just came in the side entrance. Parked in the underground lot."

"Damn it, of course that's where he'd go. My brain's not working this morning. Thanks, Smitty." She turned and hurried toward the stairwell. Things were happening too fast. There was no way to get a handle on things.

Down the stairs, into the garage. There, in the utility parking. A big blue van. She jogged over. "Phil!" she called out. Phil was just getting out of the side door and looked up at her, a grim expression on his face. Somehow he had found the time to shave and change into a suit, Sam noted. But the look on his face . . . she slowed down about fifteen feet from him, wondering what had gone wrong now.

"Is he—is he going to . . ." Her voice trailed off, and she was no longer sure what she was trying to ask.

"I don't know," Phil said. "I've done my best, and I think he understands. But God only knows what will happen in court."

"Did you hear about Suzanne?" Sam asked. "She's coming into court in person."

Phil nodded stiffly. "I don't like it. She's not well, that much I know. It can't be a good idea for her.

"What about—"

"He's in the van. Here, step back a minute. Pont dry talking with him/' Phil cautioned. "He's still not I

oriented. I think I've explained things well enough, but it would be very easy to confuse him." Phil pushed the door control panel and the van's rear cargo door slid open. A walkdown slide came out of the base of the van, forming a smooth ramp between the van and the garage floor.

"Come on, David," Phil said. There was a stirring in the van, and then Clancy's rough-hewn face poked out of the van and looked around. He stepped carefully out onto the ramp and cautiously made his way down, the linkup cable trailing from the back of his neck. He stepped to one side of the ramp and looked directly at Sam. She returned his gaze and drew her breath in. Good God, she thought. It worked. Clancy broke eye contact and started his head swiveling around in a disturbingly mechanical manner. He was dressed in a grey suit that did not fit very well, the tie inexpertly tied. No doubt Phil had dressed him, and had trouble managing a tie around someone else's neck. His sandy hair and blocky features seemed out of place without a Clancy uniform to set them off.

But no, this was not Clancy anymore.

This was someone new.

Then there was a low humming noise from inside the van, and Herbert wheeled his way down the ramp, his manipulator arms being careful to keep the cable free of the ground.

The two of them, Herbert and Clancy, stood there at the back of the van, waiting.

Phil shook his head. "Madness," he said. "Absolute madness. How did I get myself into this?" he asked. "Come on, David, Sam. Let's get in there."

Sam resisted the effort to speak as the four—or was it three, or five?—of them walked and rolled toward the elevator. They all got in, Sam pressed the button, and they rode upward. What good was it not to speak, Sam wondered, when the hallway outside the courtroom was bound to be a mass of primordial human chaos?

The doors slid open, and sure enough, it was as bad or

worse than the madness out in the plaza. Every kind of curiosity seeker and courtroom hanger-on was there, jammed in with a boisterous crowd of reporters and cyborgs of all kinds. They had to walk through that sideshow crowd, deliver the main freak to the freak show. Sam felt Phil's hand slip into her own and give it a quick squeeze before they stepped out into the corridor.

A wave of silence seemed to wash over the hallway as they made their way down toward the courtroom. David H.C., the linked bodies of Clancy and Herbert, was something that had never been seen before. A buzzing of speculation seemed to build up behind them. Sam felt her heart pounding as the corridor full of eyes pressed down upon her.

She found herself looking at one person at a time, one person only, struggling to keep her mind from the fact that they were all staring at her. Look at one, just one at a time. A grizzled, unshaven cyborg in stained coveralls, with two glistening metal arms sprouting from his shoulders, a toothpick dangling from his mouth. A nervous-looking young woman in a conservative business suit, her arms full of papers, staring pop-eyed at them as they passed. A reporter she knew, who managed to catch her eye. He seemed just about to step forward and ask what was going on, but Sam shook her head, warning him off. A tall, burly, bushy-eyebrowed man in some sort of blue medical-service uniform, muscular and solid, but with a firm gentleness in his eyes, carrying some large white-wrapped bundle in his arms. A court security guard, holding the door open for them, trying to maintain his composure—

"Sam! Phfflipe!" Suzanne's voice. Funny. Sam hadn't noticed her in the crowd. Sam stopped turned, and

ed in the direction the voice was coming from. I

the blue-uniformed man. From the bundle the man was

carrying. Now that she looked, she noticed a tuft of hair,

an ey( -it from the bundle, a burden that now

tall for what it had to he.

Sam felt the blood in her veins turn to ice.

The nurse pulled the blanket back a bit, exposing Suzanne's face. "I'm sorry to carry her in here like this/' he said. "But things got confused. They delivered the powerbed to the courtroom before I got here. There was no other way to bring her up."

But Sam was not listening. She stared, fascinated, horrified, amazed, at the face, the limbless body, wrapped in the blankets.

Suzanne. Suzanne Jantille. Sam stepped forward slowly, staring down at the frail, tiny form. Suzanne Jantille. For the first time in her life, Samantha Crandall was looking at the actual person, not at the remote. "Hello, Suzanne," she said. "How—how are you?"

Her face was gaunt, her skin almost transparently pale, her big brown eyes bright and luminous, set against a face almost skeletal in its thinness. "I've been better," she said, her voice little more than a whisper. Suddenly she was caught in a fit of coughing.

Sam glanced toward Phillipe for a minute, and was stunned to see that he was not approaching Suzanne, that instead he was ushering Clancy and Herbert into court.

With a flash of insight, Sam understood, and was terrified at the news that understanding brought. This was the state his father had reached before the end. This was what Phillipe Sanders's father had looked like before— Sam forced back the tears that were suddenly in her eyes and let the thought finish. Before he died. And Phillipe could not bear to look on it again.

"You've got David here," Suzanne said, her voice raspy and weak. "Is he all right? Did it work?"

Sam swallowed and shook her head, determined to keep her voice even. "I don't know. There hasn't been time to ask. I don't even think Phil knows. You'll have to ask him." Sam reached out a hand and touched Suzanne's fever-hot cheek. "Oh, Suzanne. Oh, dear."

"It's all right, Sam," Suzanne said, her voice seeming a bit stronger. "I'm used to it. But we'd better get in. I'm sure Nurse Bishop's arms are getting tired."

Sam nodded numbly and followed the nurse inside the empty courtroom, no longer really seeing much of anything. She had stumbled up to the first row of the spectators' seats before she realized where she was. She looked around herself, and suddenly burst out in a smile. It had been a mistake, a mad joke, a dream. There was the real Suzanne, sitting at the defense table, strong and whole—

And not moving. Sam looked from the remote to the

woman, trom the woman to the remote. I'm looking at

The Picture of Dorian Gray, she thought, the image of the

m split away from the reality, the two finally and utterly

divergent from each other.

The strong, healthy, youthful machine, dressed in its confident business suit, staring straight ahead, motionless, suddenly no more than an inert mannequin, a dress-up doll grown large. A doll that provided the illusion of strength and health for the mutilated, wasted, tiny body of the real Suzanne. Sam watched as Nurse Bishop gently settled Suzanne into the compact portable powerbed, tucked her in, strapped her in, and arranged the controls. He raised the head end of the bed, bringing Suzanne's head up nearly to normal eye level. He set up a control frame that would allow Suzanne to control the bed by moving her head. At last he stepped back and left her alone.

Sam looked at her. A pale white face, framed by unruly, uncombed, grey-flecked chestnut hair, the form of her limbless trunk a too-small bulge under the sheets of the powerbed. An ethereal face, lost in a sea oi white linens.

And sitting at the defense table, at the place reserved for the defendant, next to the motionless form of Suzanne-Remote, sat another humanoid robot, Clancy. looking about himself with every indication of iiv curiosity. At his feet, kneeling there like some enormous dog at the side of its master, was Herbert. Suzanne-Re-Herbcrr, Clancy. In some bizarre way. it was a family portrait, a nightmare image of the h

Sam sensed Phil standing next to her. She turned toward him, and saw that he had regained his composure, at least somewhat. He looked toward Suzanne, the real one, the flesh and the blood of her, forcing himself to see her, and nodded. "Hello, Suzanne."

"Hello, Phil," she said, and lost herself in a fit of coughing for a moment. At last she stopped and nodded toward the collection of robots at the defense table and grinned. "I may be in trouble. The judge ordered me to avoid any further theatrics."

Theodore Peng arrived into the court just as the first of the spectators was let in, just as the judge appeared through his door at the rear of the bench. The clerk called the court to order, and Ted Peng was already in his seat, shuffling his papers, before the image of the woman in the bed truly registered on him. His head snapped up as if a puppet master had pulled a string. That was the opposing counsel. Sweet Jesus God. What had he done? But then the gavel smacked down, and it was too late to wonder such things.

Judge Koenig adjusted the papers on the bench, and then looked down at the scene before him. He sat nearly as motionless as Suzanne-Remote, an expectant hush blanketing the courtroom. His eyes swept over Suzanne, over her inert other self, across Clancy and Herbert and the link that bound them. At last he closed his eyes and bowed his head for a moment, in prayer, or perhaps merely in an effort to control his own frustration. At last he looked up again.

"Madame Jantille," he began. "I must offer my sincere and heartfelt apologies. It is plainly obvious that it has required great effort and personal courage for you to come here today. The court notes and appreciates your dedication to your client and your case. But I am a judge of the facts and the law as weD as a human being—and I

am forced to leave such consideration to one side and judge the case on its merits. I must hold lawyers, however courageous, accountable for their actions. So please tell me: Why in God's name are all these robots cluttering up my courtroom? Herbert has to be here, I understand that. But why the other two?"

Suzanne wet her too-dry lips and nodded her head for a moment. It was damned hard to express respect by body posture when you were reduced to a head and a torso. She struggled to take a deep breath, restrained another fit of coughing, and spoke. "I tender my apologies for the continued presence of my remote, Your Honor," she said, her voice deep and raspy, her breath coming in harsh gasps and wheezes. "In the rush to arrange my arrival here in person, there simply was not time to arrange for her to be collected. I should have put her in homer mode and had her walk to her relay van, let the van take her home. It simply slipped my mind. As to the other human-form robot—that is Clancy, through whom my husband will speak."

Koenig looked almost ready to explode. "Are you suggesting that this robot is some sort of spiritualistic medium? Because if you are—"

"No, Your Honor, certainly not," Suzanne said with a bit too much animation. She had to stop again for a minute for another fit of coughing. Her nurse came toward her, but she shook her head, stopping him from approaching. "Excuse me, Your Honor. I am not in the best of health. To explain briefly, there was a malfunction during the mindload experiment that put my husband's —my client's—brain inside Herbert, rendering my client completely unable to speak or to control Herbert's body in any way. As this other robot, Clancy, has a nervous system based on a human model, it was possible to adapt Clancy, make him serve as a substitute body. In short, my husband's mind resides in Herbert's body, but directly controls Clancy. Herbert is programmed to follow Clancy. The last of the adjustments to the system were

only made this morning." She let out another gasping breath, worn out by the long speech.

The judge did not seem to notice she was still in discomfort. "More insane techno-gibberish," he said. "Mr. Peng, are you going along with this nonsense?"

Peng rose and spoke. "For the moment, yes, Your Honor. I don't know for sure that the defense has accomplished it, but to the best of my knowledge, such an arrangement is technically possible. I would be most interested to see if the defense has succeeded."

The judge sighed. "I see," he said at last. "Mr. Peng, I take it you would be willing to let the defense present its arguments first?"

"Under the circumstances, yes, Your Honor." "Very well. Madame Jantille, you may begin." Suzanne turned her head a bit, and took a sip of water through the powerbed's drink straw. "Thank you, Your Honor," she gasped. "The defense calls David Bailey, also known as David Herbert Clancy Bailey, to the stand."

All eyes turn toward me, but I am distracted by the sight of the inert robot I sit next to. I know who it is, but then I turn my head and see the same person once again. The two are vastly different in appearance, and yet I know them to be one. The same person, and yet not. Both are my wife, of that I am certain. I feel a strange excitement inside myself. The sight of her convinces me. This is real, no dream, no fog of delusion over true circumstances. I will help Suzanne help me.

If I can.

I stand and walk to the witness box. Herbert stands as well, and follows behind me, the two of • us moving slowly and carefully. I get to the box, and sit in the chair, and it creaks under the weight of my robot body. Herbert moves to one side of the box and kneels down, lies at my side like a dog on a leash.

It was hard, Suzanne told herself, wondering how the fever could be this bad and not drench her in sweat. It was terribly, terribly hard. But it was nearly over. Once David was on the stand, the case would be decided, one way or the other. It would be David's words and behavior that would decide if he was human. And that was as it should be, and nothing else mattered. Nothing at all.

The clerk took the Bible in her hand and, moving a bit hesitantly, approached the witness box. Keeping her body as far from the witness as possible, she shoved the Bible forward.

Clancy's smooth, mechanically perfect arm swung out and down, and placed itself neatly and precisely on the Bible.

"Ah, ah. Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?" the clerk said, blurting the words out as fast as she could.

There was a moment of silence, deep and quiet.

Clancy's head shifted a bit and swung around to face the clerk. Suzanne felt herself holding her breath in spite of herself, knowing that she would have to fight that much harder for air in a minute.

"I do," he said at last, his voice firm and clear.

The court buzzed and hummed as the spectators reacted to the sight of a robot taking the stand, a witness in his own defense.

Tears welled up in Suzanne's eyes and she gasped for breath. But it was not the sight, but the sound, the words, that struck at her heart. They were not just the first words he had spoken in court, but the first words Suzanne had heard him say since his death. He was alive. She felt her heart beating like a trip-hammer, the pain and strain in her body competing with the thrill and triumph in her soul.

The rituals of the oath were over. The clerk took her Bible back and retreated as quickly as she could.

With a faint whirring noise, Suzanne's p ow e ib cd moved forward, toward the judge's bench and the witness stand.

Gasping and wheezing in pain, Suzanne Jantille raised her head as far as she could and looked straight at the strange conglomeration of spare parts in the witness stand. Pain, fear, loss, and even a flicker of triumph swept across her face. A tear slid down her cheek, and a broken smile of victory lit up her too-pale face.

But the pain and fear didn't matter anymore. She had won. There was no doubt about that now. With those two words, David had broken through. No robot could have handled the syntax and the rhetorical flourishes of the oath, understood the ritual and dealt with it. Only a human could have done that. He had answered as a man would do, not as a machine might.

She looked at the judge, and saw the same knowledge in his eyes. And if the judge saw that David was alive, how could he possibly permit David to be tried for his own murder? The case, the game, was over even as it began. She shifted her head as best she could to look at Theodore Peng. She could read it there, in his face too. He knew he could not overcome this move.

The prosecution's whole plan had centered on a mute, helpless, inarticulate defendant. But her husband was in the witness stand, able to speak for himself. All else crumbled before that simple fact. She turned back toward Clancy. "Could you state your name for the record, please," she asked, her voice raspy and weak, the blood singing in her temples. There was something wrong with her vision as well, but that didn't matter.

Again there was a long pause as Clancy's—no, David H.C.'s—face turned toward Suzanne. The dead man looked at his wife's face. "My name was David Bailey," he said. "But I am not myself anymore."

"Then, then, who are you?" she asked, forcing the words out, struggling to hold on, knowing her grasp was weakening. But it didn't matter anymore.

"I am David Bailey," he said a bit more firmly. "But I have been to some very strange places." David H.C. paused once again and looked at her carefully. "And you are—yes, you are my wife. My wife," he said in a voice of

husky emotion no robot could achieve. He stood up in the witness box, leaned forward, raised his hand, and reached out for her. "You are—you are Suzanne."

The tears were flowing freely down her cheeks now. "Yes, yes I am/' she said, speaking scarcely above a whisper.

She paused a moment and came closer, closer. "Hello, David," she said in a voice so weak and thready even she could scarcely hear it.

Now his hand, his hard plastic robot hand, could reach out and touch her face, be wetted by her tears.

Somewhere outside the two of them, the courtroom and the judge and the crowd still existed, but Suzanne did not see them anymore. The world was a warm and glowing fog, with nothing in it but the face and the hand of a robot, the face and the hand that were now her husband's.

"You've changed," he said, looking at her with a thrilling intensity.

She smiled, and even laughed quietly, and paid for laughter with another wracking cough. "Yes," she said. "And so have you."

He smiled, and she had never seen a finer sight. Then, suddenly a look of terrible sorrow seemed to cloud that plastic face, a face that should have been all but immobile, as if a painful memory had just erupted to the surface. "I'm sorry," he said at last. "It was an accident. The experiment failed. I did not mean to leave you then."

She felt it coming, the wrenching pain, the fog lifting up over her, the lights growing dim, her breath growing short. The pain washed over her, reached out to claim her, but she held it off a moment longer. "It's all right, David. You came back. Who else has ever done that? I don't think—/ can."

She looked again at his perfect face, struggling to hold the collapse Oft to lei this moment pass and end.

But her tormented body could restrain LtseU DO more. At last it came, the spasm, the stabbing, wracking cough-

ing fit that would not stop, the sudden impossibility of breathing, the horrible wrenching wheeze of lungs struggling to take in the air that would not come.

She was unconscious before the tech-nurse could reach her, David's hand still touching her face.

Epilogue

My wife, Suzanne, died that same night. The pieces of paper say respiratory collapse brought on by pneumonia, but that was merely what got her first. Anything could have carried her off, once she started driving herself as hard as she had.

Three days have passed since then.

The fogs have largely lifted from my mind in those three days, but it is true, what I said in court. I am not myself anymore. I have been changed, burned and refined, purified and then alloyed anew in a crucible, a furnace, that no man or woman before me has ever experienced. Yet others will follow. I know it.

Yesterday, two days after Suzanne's death, the hearing reconvened, and I represented myself. The judge ruled me human. In the tumult and chaos of that courtroom there was little else he could do.

But his ruling did not even matter in the end. Theodore Peng, honorable warrior, acting contrary to Julia Entwhistle's specific instructions, that day announced in court that the United States Attorney's office was dropping all charges against me. He had no more stomach for the fight.

He announced his own resignation on the courthouse steps an hour later, and declared that he would start work immediately campaigning for Sam Crandall's Fresh Start proposal. The papers and news links have been full of the idea.

Now I stand by the graveside, and look down into the place where death lies. She died for me, died in the act of winning my life for me. The service is brief, and private, and quickly ends. Only a few friends have attended, the press and the crowds kept well at bay.

The image is burned in my mind, of my poor wife's wasted, weakened frame, lying dead in her powerbed, while her remote unit sat perfect and inert at the defense table. It was the remote that the world saw, that formed the world's image of Suzanne.

Samantha has told me how she thought of Dorian Gray, but Suzanne lived the reverse of Gray's life. It was my wife's image that remained the same, while it was the reality that wasted away unseen—killed not by depravity, but by the search for right.

There are few better deaths.

Farewell Suzanne, I think. / shall always miss you, and mourn you, and love you. There is no end to the debt I owe to you.

The reporter, Samantha Crandall, and the policeman, Phillipe Sanders, walk back to the cars with me, after the graveside service is over. Strange and strange again, they are both here doing their jobs. Sam is covering the funeral for the Post, and Phil is serving as traffic control officer for the funeral cortege. He has accepted his demotion with dignity, and I have no doubt that if he chooses to remain on the force, he will rise up in the ranks again, well past his former station. He is not a man who quits, or fails.

It is awkward for me to walk, even yet. I have not yet managed the knack of managing Clancy while relying on Herbert to take care of himself. Clancy's body walks

1

ahead as always, while Herbert's follows loyally behind, the weight of his body driving his feet deep into the soft earth. It is strange that I do not truly know which body is mine, which, if either, I truly inhabit. Both, I suppose, though at times I feel attached to neither.

Phillipe tells me that, given time, he can replace the cable connecting my two bodies, install a radio link, and thus let my Clancy body roam free while Herbert remains at home, bearing my mind, my brain. A remote system, not unlike Suzanne's. I can see the way it could be done, and I am eager to bring my old skills to the job. At times it seems to me that a radio remote system would be a great improvement. Other times it sounds like a most disturbing change. I am growing used to who I am, a soul divided into two metal vessels. Perhaps I have had enough with changing bodies.

We are at the cars, and I am about to board my remote van for the ride home when Sam stops me, touches Clancy on the arm, and looks back toward the grave. Her face is full of sadness, and of bewilderment.

"Why?" she asks me. "Why? Why did she put herself through all that? The pain, the humiliation? Why did she struggle so hard? Other quadriplegics have turned down remotes. Some have even chosen to die. Why did she do it all? Why did she fight so hard to save you when it was a one in a million shot you were even still alive?"

I look at Samantha Crandall, and see a lovely young woman, her flame-red hair caught by a playful breeze, a strong young man standing by her side, two people clearly at the beginning of things. Behind them I see a green hillside, a blue sky, a white cloud. I hear birds singing, the low hum of human conversation, see the little knots of people gathering together here and there, reaching out to touch each other, comfort each other in grief. I hear the sound of laughter, incongruous but welcome in this place, the sign that someone has shared a happy memory of Suzanne, found the joy in her life even amid the sadness of her death.

I look back to Samantha, ami I tell her the reason, the

obvious reason, the only reason my wife could possibly have had. "People/' I say, "who have been through what Suzanne went through, what I went through, who have lost all we have had, find out something the rest of you never truly learn, never truly appreciate to its fullest. It is the people like us, the ones who are just a little bit alive, who work the hardest to be alive.

"Let me tell you her reason. She fought like fury, and she died, because she believed something. Believed it, knew it, deep inside, with all her heart and soul, believed in that something so deeply that she gave up her own share so others might have it.

"Suzanne," I say, "believed, first and foremost, that it is good to be alive."

What other belief could be better to die for?

INTELLIGENT ROBOTS AND CYBERNETIC ORGANISMS

BY ISAAC ASIMOV

1. INTELLIGENT ROBOTS

Robots don't have to be very intelligent to be intelligent enough. If a robot can follow simple orders and do the housework, or run simple machines in a cut-and-dried, repetitive way, we would be perfectly satisfied.

Constructing a robot is hard because you must fit a very compact computer inside its skull, if it is to have a vaguely human shape. Making a sufficiently complex computer as compact as the human brain is also hard.

But robots aside, why bother making a computer that compact? The units that make up a computer have been getting smaller and smaller, to be sure—from vacuum tubes to transistors to tiny integrated circuits and silicon chips. Suppose that, in addition to making the units smaller, we also make the whole structure bigger.

A brain that gets too large would eventually begin to lose efficiency because nerve impulses don't travel very quickly. Even the speediest nerve impulses travel at only about 3.75 miles a minute. A nerve impulse can tlash from one end of the brain to the other in one four-hun-dred-fortieth of a second, but a brain 9 miles long, if we

could imagine one, would require 2.4 minutes for a nerve impulse to travel its length. The added complexity made possible by the enormous size would fall apart simply because of the long wait for information to be moved and processed within it.

Computers, however, use electric impulses that travel at more than 11 million miles per minute. A computer 400 miles wide would still flash electric impulses from end to end in about one four-hundred-fortieth of a second. In that respect, at least, a computer of that asteroi-dal size could still process information as quickly as the human brain could.

If, therefore, we imagine computers being manufactured with finer and finer components, more and more intricately interrelated, and also imagine those same computers becoming larger and larger, might it not be that the computers would eventually become capable of doing all the things a human brain can do?

Is there a theoretical limit to how intelligent a computer can become?

I've never heard of any. It seems to me that each time we learn to pack more complexity into a given volume, the computer can do more. Each time we make a computer larger, while keeping each portion as densely complex as before, the computer can do more.

Eventually, if we learn how to make a computer sufficiently complex and sufficiently large, why should it not achieve a human intelligence?

Some people are sure to be disbelieving and say, "But how can a computer possibly produce a great symphony, a great work of art, a great new scientific theory?"

The retort I am usually tempted to make to this question is, "Can you?" But, of course, even if the questioner is ordinary, there are extraordinary people who are geniuses. They attain genius, however, only because atoms and molecules within their brains are arranged in some complex order. There's nothing in their brains but atoms and molecules. If we arrange atoms and molecules in

some complex order in a computer, the products of genius should be possible to it; and if the individual parts are not as tiny and delicate as those of the brain, we compensate by making the computer larger.

Some people may say, "But computers can only do what they're programmed to do."

The answer to that is, "True. But brains can do only what they're programmed to do—by their genes. Part of the brain's programming is the ability to learn, and that will be part of a complex computer's programming."

In fact, if a computer can be built to be as intelligent as a human being, why can't it be made more intelligent as well?

Why not, indeed? Maybe that's what evolution is all about. Over the space of three billion years, hit-and-miss development of atoms and molecules has finally produced, through glacially slow improvement, a species intelligent enough to take the next step in a matter of centuries, or even decades. Then things will really move.

But if computers become more intelligent than human beings, might they not replace us? Well, shouldn't they? They may be as kind as they are intelligent and just let us dwindle by attrition. They might keep some of us as pets, or on reservations.

Then too, consider what we're doing to ourselves right now—to all living things and to the very planet we live on. Maybe it is time we were replaced. Maybe the real danger is that computers won't be developed to the point of replacing us fast enough.

Think about it!

2. INTELLIGENCES TOGETHER I mentioned tl ibittty that robots might t*

intelligent that they would eventually replace . gested with a touch of cynicism, that in view of the human >uch a replacement might 'nng.

Since then, robots have rapidly become more and more important in industry, and, although they are as yet quite idiotic on the intelligence scale, they are advancing quickly.

Perhaps, then, we ought to take another look at the matter of robots (or computers—which are the actual driving mechanism of robots) replacing us. The outcome, of course, depends on how intelligent computers become and whether they will become so much more intelligent than we are that they will regard us as no more than pets, at best, or vermin, at worst. This implies that intelligence is a simple thing that can be measured with something like a ruler or a thermometer (or an IQ test) and then expressed in a single number. If the average human being is measured as 100 on an overall intelligence scale, then as soon as the average computer passes 100, we will be in trouble.

Is that the way it works, though? Surely there must be considerable variety in such a subtle quality as intelligence; different species of it, so to speak. I presume it takes intelligence to write a coherent essay, to choose the right words, and to place them in the right order. I also presume it takes intelligence to study some intricate technical device, to see how it works and how it might be improved—or how it might be repaired if it had stopped working. As far as writing is concerned, my intelligence is extremely high; as far as tinkering is concerned, my intelligence is extremely low. Well, then, am I a genius or an imbecile? The answer is: neither. I'm just good at some things and not good at others—and that's true of every one of us.

Suppose, then, we think about the origins of both human intelligence and computer intelligence. The human brain is built up essentially of proteins and nucleic acids; it is the product of over 3 billion years of hit-or-miss evolution; and the driving forces of its development have been adaptation and survival. Computers, on the other hand, are built up essentially of metal and electron

surges; they are the product of some forty years of deliberate human design ahd development; and the driving force of their development has been the human desire to meet perceived human needs. If there are many aspects and varieties of intelligence among human beings themselves, isn't it certain that human and computer intelligences are going to differ widely since they have originated and developed under such different circumstances, out of such different materials, and under the impulse of such different drives?

It would seem that computers, even comparatively simple and primitive specimens, are extraordinarily good in some ways. They possess capacious memories, have virtually instant and unfailing recall, and demonstrate the ability to carry through vast numbers of repetitive arithmetical operations without weariness or error. If that sort of thing is the measure of intelligence, then already computers are far more intelligent than we are. It is because they surpass us so greatly that we use them in a million different ways and know that our economy would fall apart if they all stopped working at once.

But such computer ability is not the only measure of intelligence. In fact, we consider that ability of so little value that no matter how quick a computer is and how impressive its solutions, we see it only as an overgrown slide rule with no true intelligence at all. What the human specialty seems to be, as tar as intelligence is concerned, is the ability to see problems as a whole, to grasp solutions through intuition or insight; to see new combinations; to be able to make extraordinarily perceptive and creative guesses. Can't we program a computer to do the same thing? Not likely, for we don't know how we do it.

It would seem, then, that computers should gel better and better in their variety ot point-by-point, short-t Intelligence, and that human beings (thanks to i:k ing knowledge ^ik\ understanding of the brain and the

growing technology til genetic engineerir im-

prove in their own variety of whole-problem, long-focus intelligence. Each variety of intelligence has its advantages and, in combination, human intelligence and computer intelligence—each filling in the gaps and compensating for the weaknesses of the other—can advance far more rapidly than either one could alone. It will not be a case of competing and replacing at all but of intelligences together, working more efficiently than either alone within the laws of nature.

3. CYBERNETIC ORGANISMS

A robot is a robot and an organism is an organism.

An organism, as we all know, is built up of cells. From the molecular standpoint, its key molecules are nucleic acids and proteins. These float in a watery medium, and the whole has a bony support system. It is useless to go on with the description, since we are all familiar with organisms and since we are examples of them ourselves.

A robot, on the other hand, is (as usually pictured in science fiction) an object, more or less resembling a human being, constructed out of strong, rust-resistant metal. Science fiction writers are generally chary of describing the robotic details too closely since they are not usually essential to the story and the writers are generally at a loss how to do so.

The impression one gets from the stories, however, is that a robot is wired, so that it has wires through which electricity flows rather than tubes through which blood flows. The ultimate source of power is either unnamed, or is assumed to partake of the nature of nuclear power.

What of the robotic brain?

When I wrote my first few robot stories in 1939 and 1940, I imagined a "positronic brain" of a spongy type of platinum-iridium alloy. It was platinum-iridium because that is a particularly inert metal and is least likely to undergo chemical changes. It was spongy so that it would offer an enormous surface on which electrical patterns

could be formed and un-formed. It was "positronic" because four years before my first robot story, the positron had been discovered as a reverse kind of electron, so that "positronic" in place of "electronic" had a delightful science-fiction sound.

Nowadays, of course, my positronic platinum-iridium brain is hopelessly archaic. Even ten years after its invention it became outmoded. By the end of the 1940s, we came to realize that a robot's brain must be a kind of computer. Indeed, if a robot were to be as complex as the robots in my most recent novels, the robot brain-computer must be every bit as complex as the human brain. It must be made of tiny microchips no larger than, and as complex as, brain cells.

But now let us try to imagine something that is neither organism nor robot, but a combination of the two. Perhaps we can think of it as an organism-robot or "orbot." That would clearly be a poor name, for it is only "robot" with the first two letters transposed. To say "or-gabot," instead, is to be stuck with a rather ugly word.

We might call it a robot-organism, or a "robotanism," which, again, is ugly or "roborg." To my ears, "roborg" doesn't sound bad, but we can't have that. Something else has arisen.

The science of computers was given the name "cybernetics" by Norbert Weiner a generation ago, so that if we consider something that is part robot and part organism and remember that a robot is cybernetic in nature, we might think of the mixture as a "cybernetic organism," or a "cyborg." In fact, that is the name that has stuck and is used.

To see what a cyborg might be, let's try starting with a human organism and moving toward a robot; and when we are quite done with that, let's start with a robot and move toward a human being.

To move from a human organism toward a robot, we must begin replacing portions of the human organism with robotic parts. We already do that in some ways. For

instance, a good percentage of the original material of my teeth is now metallic, and metal is, of course, the robotic substance par excellence.

The replacements don't have to be metallic, of course. Some parts of my teeth are now ceramic in nature, and can't be told at a glance from the natural dentine. Still, even though dentine is ceramic in appearance and even, to an extent, in chemical structure, it was originally laid down by living material and bears the marks of its origin. The ceramic that has replaced the dentine shows no trace of life, now or ever.

We can go further. My breastbone, which had to be split longitudinally in an operation a few years back is now held together by metallic staples, which have remained in place ever since. My sister-in-law has an artificial hip-joint replacement. There are people who have artificial arms or legs and such non-living limbs are being designed, as time passes on, to be ever more complex and useful. There are people who have lived for days and even months with artificial hearts, and many more people who live for years with pacemakers.

We can imagine, little by little, this part and that part of the human being replaced by inorganic materials and engineering devices. Is there any part which we would find difficult to replace, even in imagination?

I don't think anyone would hesitate there. Replace every part of the human being but one—the limbs, the heart, the liver, the skeleton, and so on—and the product would remain human. It would be a human being with artificial parts, but it would be a human being.

But what about the brain?

Surely, if there is one thing that makes us human it is the brain. If there is one thing that makes us a human individual it is the intensely complex makeup, the emotions, the learning, the memory content of our particular brain. You can't simply replace a brain with a thinking device off some factory shelf. You have to put in something that incorporates all that a natural brain has

learned, that possesses all its memory, and that mimics its exact pattern of working.

An artificial limb might not work exactly like a natural one, but might still serve the purpose. The same might be true of an artificial lung, kidney, or liver. An artificial brain, however, must be the precise replica of the brain it replaces, or the human being in question is no longer the same human being.

It is the brain, then, that is the sticking point in going from human organism to robot.

And the reverse?

In "The Bicentennial Man," I described the passage of my robot-hero, Andrew Martin, from robot to man. Little by little, he had himself changed, till his every visible part was human in appearance. He displayed an intelligence that was increasingly equivalent (or even superior) to that of a man. He was an artist, a historian, a scientist, an administrator. He forced the passage of laws guaranteeing robotic rights, and achieved respect and admiration in the fullest degree.

Yet at no point could he make himself accepted as a man. The sticking point, here, too, was his robotic brain. He found that he had to deal with that before the final hurdle could be overcome.

Therefore, we come down to the dichotomy, body and brain. The ultimate cyborgs are those in which the body and brain don't match. That means we can have two classes of complete cyborgs:

a) a robotic brain in a human body, or

b) a human brain in a robotic body.

We can take it for granted that in estimating the worth of a human being (or a robot, for that matter) we judge first by superficial appearance.

I can very easily imagine a man seeing a woman of superlative beauty and gazing in awe and wonder at the si^ht. "What a beautiful woman," he will say, or think, and he could easily imagine himself in love with her on the spot. In romances, I believe thai happens as a matte!

of routine. And, of course, a woman seeing a man of superlative beauty is surely likely to react in precisely the same way.

If you fall in love with a striking beauty, you are scarcely likely to spend much time asking if she (or he, of course) has any brains, or possesses a good character, or has good judgment or kindness or warmth. If you find out eventually that good looks are the person's only redeeming quality, you are liable to make excuses and continue to be guided, for a time at least, by the conditioned reflex of erotic response. Eventually, of course, you will tire of good looks without content, but who knows how long that will take?

On the other hand, a person with a large number of good qualities who happened to be distinctly plain might not be likely to entangle you in the first place unless you were intelligent enough to see those good qualities so that you might settle down to a lifetime of happiness.

What I am saying, then, is that a cyborg with a robotic brain in a human body is going to be accepted by most, if not all, people as a human being; while a cyborg with a human brain in a robotic body is going to be accepted by most, if not all, people as a robot. You are, after all—at least to most people—what you seem to be.

These two diametrically opposed cyborgs will not, however, pose a problem to human beings to the same degree.

Consider the robotic brain in the human body and ask why the transfer should be made. A robotic brain is better off in a robotic body since a human body is far the more fragile of the two. You might have a young and stalwart human body in which the brain has been damaged by trauma and disease, and you might think, "Why waste that magnificent human body? Let's put a robotic brain in it so that it can live out its life."

If you were to do that, the human being that resulted would not be the original. It would be a different individual human being. You would not be conserving an indi-

vidual but merely a specific mindless body. And a human body, however fine, is (without the brain that goes with it) a cheap thing. Every day, half a million new bodies come into being. There is no need to save any one of them if the brain is done.

On the other hand, what about a human brain in a robotic body? A human brain doesn't last forever, but it can last up to ninety years without falling into total uselessness. It is not at all unknown to have a ninety-year-old who is still sharp, and capable of rational and worthwhile thought. And yet we also know that many a superlative mind has vanished after twenty or thirty years because the body that housed it (and was worthless in the absence of the mind) had become uninhabitable through trauma or disease. There would be a strong impulse then to transfer a perfectly good (even superior) brain into a robotic body to give it additional decades of useful life.

Thus, when we say "cyborg" we are very likely to think, just about exclusively, of a human brain in a robotic body—and we are going to think of that as a robot.

We might argue that a human mind is a human mind, and that it is the mind that counts and not the surrounding support mechanism, and we would be right. I'm sure that any rational court would decide that a human-brain cyborg would have all the legal rights of a man. He could vote, he must not be enslaved, and so on.

And yet suppose a cyborg were challenged: "Prove that you have a human brain and not a robotic brain, before I let you have human rights."

The easiest way for a cyborg to offer the proof is for him to demonstrate that he is not bound by the Three Laws of Robotics. Since the Three Laws enforce socially acceptable behavior, this means he must demonstrate that he is capable of human (i.e. nasty) behavior. The simplest and most unanswerable argument is simply to knock the challenger down, breaking his jaw in the pro-

cess, since no robot could do that. (In fact, in my story "Evidence/' which appeared in 1947,1 use this as a way of proving someone is not a robot—but in that case there was a catch.)

But if a cyborg must continually offer violence in order to -prove he has a human brain, that will not necessarily win him friends.

For that matter, even if he is accepted as human and allowed to vote and to rent hotel rooms and do all the other things human beings can do, there must nevertheless be some regulations that distinguish between him and complete human beings. The cyborg would be stronger than a man, and his metallic fists could be viewed as lethal weapons. He might still be forbidden to strike a human being, even in self-defense. He couldn't engage in various sports on an equal basis with human beings, and so on.

Ah, but need a human brain be housed in a metallic robotic body? What about housing it in a body made of ceramic and plastic and fiber so that it looks and feels like a human body—and has a human brain besides?

But you know, I suspect that the cyborg will still have his troubles. He'll be different. No matter how small the difference is, people will seize upon it.

We know that people who have human brains and full human bodies sometimes hate each other because of a slight difference in skin pigmentation, or a slight variation in the shape of the nose, eyes, lips, or hair.

We know that people who show no difference in any of the physical characteristics that have come to represent a cause for hatred, may yet be at daggers-drawn over matters that are not physical at all, but cultural— differences in religion, or in political outlook, or in place of birth, or in language, or in just the accent of a language.

Let's face it. Cyborgs will have their difficulties, no matter what.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Roger MacBride Allen was born in 1957. THE MODULAR MAN is his eighth science fiction novel. Relying on the false assumption that a writer must live something before writing about it, various people who have read his previous novels have assumed that he was a defense contractor, British, black, a woman, an astrophysicist, a paleoanthro-pologist, a reporter, and/or a Baptist. As this book goes to press, he is none of the above. He lives in Washington, D.C.

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Roger MacBride Allen was

born in 1957 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, birthplace of P. T. Barnum and Walt Kelly. Relying on the false assumption that a writer must live something before writing it, various people who have read his previous novels have assumed that he was a defense contractor, British, black, a woman, an astrophysicist, a paleoanthropologist, a reporter, and/or a Baptist. As this book goes to press, he is none of the above. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Isaac Asimov is the author of more than 440 books, including three Hugo Award winners and numerous bestsellers, as well as countless stories and scientific essays. He was made a Grand Master of Science Fiction by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1985. He also coined the words robotics, positronic, and psycho-history. He and his wife, science fiction writer Janet Asimov, live in New York City.