file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Walter%20Jon%20Williams%20-%20The%20Green%20Leopard%20Plague.txt

The Green Leopard Plague by Walter Jon Williams




Kicking her legs out over the ocean, the lonely mermaid gazed at the horizon from her perch in the
overhanging banyan tree.

The air was absolutely still and filled with the scent of night flowers. Large fruit bats flew
purposefully over the sea, heading for their daytime rest. Somewhere a white cockatoo gave a
penetrating squawk. A starling made a brief flutter out to sea, then came back again. The rising
sun threw up red-gold sparkles from the wavetops and brought a brilliance to the tropical growth
that crowned the many islands spread out on the horizon.

The mermaid decided it was time for breakfast. She slipped from her hanging canvas chair and
walked out along one of the banyan’s great limbs. The branch swayed lightly under her weight, and
her bare feet found sure traction on the rough bark. She looked down to see the deep blue of the
channel, distinct from the turquoise of the shallows atop the reefs.

She raised her arms, poised briefly on the limb, the ruddy light of the sun glowing bronze on her
bare skin, and then pushed off and dove head-first into the Philippine Sea. She landed with a cool
impact and a rush of bubbles.

Her wings unfolded, and she flew away.

***

After her hunt, the mermaid–her name was Michelle–cached her fishing gear in a pile of dead coral
above the reef, and then ghosted easily over the sea grass with the rippled sunlight casting
patterns on her wings. When she could look up to see the colossal, twisted tangle that was the
roots of her banyan tree, she lifted her head from the water and gulped her first breath of air.

The Rock Islands were made of soft limestone coral, and tide and chemical action had eaten away
the limestone at sea level, undercutting the stone above. Some of the smaller islands looked like
mushrooms, pointed green pinnacles balanced atop thin stems. Michelle’s island was larger and
irregularly shaped, but it still had steep limestone walls undercut six meters by the tide, with
no obvious way for a person to clamber from the sea to the land. Her banyan perched on the saucer-
edge of the island, itself undercut by the sea.

Michelle had arranged a rope elevator from her nest in the tree, just a loop on the end of a long
nylon line. She tucked her wings away–they were harder to retract than to deploy, and the gills on
the undersides were delicate–and then slipped her feet through the loop. At her verbal command, a
hoist mechanism lifted her in silence from the sea to her resting place in the bright green-
dappled forest canopy.

She had been an ape once, a siamang, and she felt perfectly at home in the treetops.

During her excursion, she had speared a yellowlip emperor, and this she carried with her in a mesh
bag. She filleted the emperor with a blade she kept in her nest, and tossed the rest into the sea,
where it became a subject of interest to a school of bait fish. She ate a slice of one fillet raw,
enjoying the brilliant flavor, sea and trembling pale flesh together, then cooked the fillets on
her small stove, eating one with some rice she’d cooked the previous evening and saving the other
for later.

By the time Michelle finished breakfast, the island was alive. Geckoes scurried over the banyan’s
bark, and coconut crabs sidled beneath the leaves like touts offering illicit downloads to passing
tourists. Out in the deep water, a flock of circling, diving black noddies marked where a school
of skipjack tuna was feeding on swarms of bait fish.

It was time for Michelle to begin her day as well. With sure, steady feet, she moved along a rope
walkway to the ironwood tree that held her satellite uplink in its crown, straddled a limb, took
her deck from the mesh bag she’d roped to the tree, and downloaded her messages.



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There were several journalists requesting interviews–the legend of the lonely mermaid was
spreading. This pleased her more often than not, but she didn’t answer any of the queries. There
was a message from Darton, which she decided to savor for a while before opening. And then she saw
a note from Dr. Davout, and opened it at once.

Davout was, roughly, twelve times her age. He’d actually been carried for nine months in his
mother’s womb, not created from scratch in a nanobed like almost everyone else she knew. He had a
sib who was a famous astronaut, a McEldowny Prize for his Lavoisier and His Age, and a red-haired
wife who was nearly as well-known as he was. A couple of years ago, Michelle had attended a series
of his lectures at the College of Mystery, and been interested despite her specialty being,
strictly speaking, biology.

He had shaved off the little goatee he’d worn when she’d last seen him, which Michelle considered
a good thing. "I have a research project for you, if you’re free," the recording said. "It
shouldn’t take too much effort."

Michelle contacted him at once. He was a rich old bastard with a thousand years of tenure and no
notion of what it was to be young in these times, and he’d pay her whatever outrageous fee she
asked.

Her material needs at the moment were few, but she wouldn’t stay on this island forever.

Davout answered right away. Behind him, working at her own console, Michelle could see his red-
haired wife Katrin.

"Michelle!" Davout said, loudly enough for Katrin to know who’d called without turning around.
"Good!" He hesitated, and then his fingers formed the mudra for <concern>. "I understand you’ve
suffered a loss," he said.

"Yes," she said, her answer delayed by a second’s satellite lag.

"And the young man–?"

"Doesn’t remember."

Which was not exactly a lie, the point being what was remembered.

Davout’s fingers were still fixed in <concern>. "Are you all right?" he asked.

Her own fingers formed an equivocal answer. "I’m getting better." Which was probably true.

"I see you’re not an ape any more."

"I decided to go the mermaid route. New perspectives, all that." And welcome isolation.

"Is there any way we can make things easier for you?"

She put on a hopeful expression. "You said something about a job?"

"Yes." He seemed relieved not to have to probe further–he’d had a real-death in his own family,
Michelle remembered, a chance-in-a-billion thing, and perhaps he didn’t want to relive any part of
that.

"I’m working on a biography of Terzian," Davout said.

" . . . And his Age?" Michelle finished.

"And his Legacy." Davout smiled. "There’s a three-week period in his life where he–well, he drops
right off the map. I’d like to find out where he went–and who he was with, if anyone."

Michelle was impressed. Even in comparatively unsophisticated times such as that inhabited by
Jonathan Terzian, it was difficult for people to disappear.

"It’s a critical time for him," Davout went on. "He’d lost his job at Tulane, his wife had just



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died–realdeath, remember–and if he decided he simply wanted to get lost, he would have all my
sympathies." He raised a hand as if to tug at the chin-whiskers that were no longer there, made a
vague pawing gesture, then dropped the hand. "But my problem is that when he resurfaces,
everything’s changed for him. In June, he delivered an undistinguished paper at the Athenai
conference in Paris, then vanished. When he surfaced in Venice in mid-July, he didn’t deliver the
paper he was scheduled to read, instead he delivered the first version of his Cornucopia Theory."

Michelle’s fingers formed the mudra <highly impressed>. "How have you tried to locate him?"

"Credit card records–they end on June 17, when he buys a lot of euros at American Express in
Paris. After that, he must have paid for everything with cash."

"He really did try to get lost, didn’t he?" Michelle pulled up one bare leg and rested her chin on
it. "Did you try passport records?"

<No luck.> "But if he stayed in the European Community he wouldn’t have had to present a passport
when crossing a border."

"Cash machines?"

"Not till after he arrived in Venice, just a couple of days prior to the conference."

The mermaid thought about it for a moment, then smiled. "I guess you need me, all right."

<I concur> Davout flashed solemnly. "How much would it cost me?"

Michelle pretended to consider the question for a moment, then named an outrageous sum.

Davout frowned. "Sounds all right," he said.

Inwardly, Michelle rejoiced. Outwardly, she leaned toward the camera lens and looked businesslike.
"I’ll get busy, then."

Davout looked grateful. "You’ll be able to get on it right away?"

"Certainly. What I need you to do is send me pictures of Terzian, from as many different angles as
possible, especially from around that period of time."

"I have them ready."

"Send away."

An eyeblink later, the pictures were in Michelle’s deck. <Thanks> she flashed. "I’ll let you know
as soon as I find anything."

At university, Michelle had discovered that she was very good at research, and it had become a
profitable sideline for her. People–usually people connected with academe in one way or
another–hired her to do the duller bits of their own jobs, finding documents or references, or, in
this case, three missing weeks out of a person’s life. It was almost always work they could do
themselves, but Michelle was simply better at research than most people, and she was considered
worth the extra expense. Michelle herself usually enjoyed the work–it gave her interesting
sidelights on fields about which she knew little, and provided a welcome break from routine.

Plus, this particular job required not so much a researcher as an artist, and Michelle was very
good at this particular art.

Michelle looked through the pictures, most scanned from old photographs. Davout had selected well:
Terzian’s face or profile was clear in every picture. Most of the pictures showed him young, in
his twenties, and the ones that showed him older were of high quality, or showed parts of the body
that would be crucial to the biometric scan, like his hands or his ears.

The mermaid paused for a moment to look at one of the old photos: Terzian smiling with his arm
around a tall, long-legged woman with a wide mouth and dark, bobbed hair, presumably the wife who
had died. Behind them was a Louis Quinze table with a blaze of gladiolas in a cloisonné vase, and,


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above the table, a large portrait of a stately-looking horse in a heavy gilded frame. Beneath the
table were stowed–temporarily, Michelle assumed–a dozen or so trophies, which to judge from the
little golden figures balanced atop them were awarded either for gymnastics or martial arts. The
opulent setting seemed a little at odds with the young, informally dressed couple: she wore a
flowery tropical shirt tucked into khakis, and Terzian was dressed in a tank top and shorts. There
was a sense that the photographer had caught them almost in motion, as if they’d paused for the
picture en route from one place to another.

Nice shoulders, Michelle thought. Big hands, well-shaped muscular legs. She hadn’t ever thought of
Terzian as young, or large, or strong, but he had a genuine, powerful physical presence that came
across even in the old, casual photographs. He looked more like a football player than a famous
thinker.

Michelle called up her character-recognition software and fed in all the pictures, then checked
the software’s work, something she was reasonably certain her employer would never have done if
he’d been doing this job himself. Most people using this kind of canned software didn’t realize
how the program could be fooled, particularly when used with old media, scanned film prints heavy
with grain and primitive digital images scanned by machines that simply weren’t very intelligent.
In the end, Michelle and the software between them managed an excellent job of mapping Terzian’s
body and calibrating its precise ratios: the distance between the eyes, the length of nose and
curve of lip, the distinct shape of the ears, the length of limb and trunk. Other men might share
some of these biometric ratios, but none would share them all.

The mermaid downloaded the data into her specialized research spiders, and sent them forth into
the electronic world.

A staggering amount of the trivial past existed there, and nowhere else. People had uploaded
pictures, diaries, commentary, and video; they’d digitized old home movies, complete with the
garish, deteriorating colors of the old film stock; they’d scanned in family trees, postcards,
wedding lists, drawings, political screeds, and images of handwritten letters. Long, dull hours of
security video. Whatever had meant something to someone, at some time, had been turned into
electrons and made available to the universe at large.

A surprising amount of this stuff had survived the Lightspeed War–none of it had seemed worth
targeting, or, if trashed, had been reloaded from backups.

What all this meant was that Terzian was somewhere in there. Wherever Terzian had gone in his
weeks of absence–Paris, Dalmatia, or Thule–there would have been someone with a camera. In stills
of children eating ice cream in front of Notre Dame, or moving through the video of buskers
playing saxophone on the Pont des Artistes, there would be a figure in the background, and that
figure would be Terzian. Terzian might be found lying on a beach in Corfu, reflected in a bar
mirror in Gdynia, or negotiating with a prostitute in Hamburg’s St. Pauli district–Michelle had
found targets in exactly those places during the course of her other searches.

Michelle sent her software forth to find Terzian, then lifted her arms above her head and
stretched–stretched fiercely, thrusting out her bare feet and curling the toes, the muscles
trembling with tension, her mouth yawned in a silent shriek.

Then she leaned over her deck again, and called up the message from Darton, the message she’d
saved till last.

"I don’t understand," he said. "Why won’t you talk to me? I love you!"

His brown eyes were a little wild.

"Don’t you understand?" he cried. "I’m not dead! I’m not really dead!"

Michelle hovered three or four meters below the surface of Zigzag Lake, gazing upward at the
inverted bowl of the heavens, the brilliant blue of the Pacific sky surrounded by the dark,
shadowy towers of mangrove. Something caught her eye, something black and falling, like a bullet:
and then there was a splash and a boil of bubbles, and the daggerlike bill of a collared
kingfisher speared a blue-eyed apogonid that had been hovering over a bright red coral head. The
kingfisher flashed its pale underside as it stroked to the surface, its wings doing efficient


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double duty as fins, and then there was a flurry of wings and feet and bubbles and the kingfisher
was airborne again.

Michelle floated up and over the barrel-shaped coral head, then over a pair of giant clams, each
over a meter long. The clams drew shut as Michelle slid across them, withdrawing the huge siphons
as thick as her wrist. The fleshy lips that overhung the scalloped edges of the shells were a riot
of colors: purples, blues, greens, and reds interwoven in a eye-boggling pattern.

Carefully drawing in her gills so their surfaces wouldn’t be inflamed by coral stings, she kicked
up her feet and dove beneath the mangrove roots into the narrow tunnel that connected Zigzag Lake
with the sea.

Of the three hundred or so Rock Islands, seventy or thereabouts had marine lakes. The islands were
made of coral limestone and porous to one degree or another: some lakes were connected to the
ocean through tunnels and caves, and others through seepage. Many of the lakes contained forms of
life unique in all the world, evolved distinctly from their remote ancestors: even now, after all
this time, new species were being described.

During the months Michelle had spent in the islands, she thought she’d discovered two undescribed
species: a variation on the Entacmaea medusivora white anemone that was patterned strangely with
scarlet and a cobalt-blue; and a nudibranch, deep violet with yellow polka dots, that had
undulated past her one night on the reef, flapping like a tea towel in a strong wind as a seven-
knot tidal current tore it along. The nudi and samples of the anemone had been sent to the
appropriate authorities, and perhaps in time Michelle would be immortalized by having a Latinate
version of her name appended to the scientific description of the two marine animals.

The tunnel was about fifteen meters long, and had a few narrow twists where Michelle had to pull
her wings in close to her sides and maneuver by the merest fluttering of their edges. The tunnel
turned up, and brightened with the sun; the mermaid extended her wings and flew over brilliant
pink soft corals toward the light.

Two hours’ work, she thought, plus a hazardous environment. Twenty-two hundred calories, easy.

The sea was brilliantly lit, unlike the gloomy marine lake surrounded by tall cliffs, mangroves,
and shadow, and for a moment Michelle’s sun-dazzled eyes failed to see the boat bobbing on the
tide. She stopped short, her wings cupping to brake her motion, and then she recognized the boat’s
distinctive paint job, a bright red meant to imitate the natural oil of the cheritem fruit.

Michelle prudently rose to the surface a safe distance away–Torbiong might be fishing, and
sometimes he did it with a spear. The old man saw her, and stood to give a wave before Michelle
could unblock her trachea and draw air into her lungs to give a hail.

"I brought you supplies," he said.

"Thanks." Michelle said as she wiped a rain of sea water from her face.

Torbiong was over two hundred years old, and Paramount Chief of Koror, the capital forty minutes
away by boat. He was small and wiry and black-haired, and had a broad-nosed, strong-chinned,
unlined face. He had traveled over the world and off it while young, but returned to Belau as he
aged. His duties as chief were mostly ceremonial, but counted for tax purposes; he had money from
hotels and restaurants that his ancestors had built and that others managed for him, and he spent
most of his time visiting his neighbors, gossiping, and fishing. He had befriended Darton and
Michelle when they’d first come to Belau, and helped them in securing the permissions for their
researches on the Rock Islands. A few months back, after Darton died, Torbiong had agreed to bring
supplies to Michelle in exchange for the occasional fish.

His boat was ten meters long and featured a waterproof canopy amidships made from interwoven
pandanas leaves. Over the scarlet faux-cheritem paint were zigzags, crosses, and stripes in the
brilliant yellow of the ginger plant. The ends of the thwarts were decorated with grotesque carved
faces, and dozens of white cowrie shells were glued to the gunwales. Wooden statues of the
kingfisher bird sat on the prow and stern.

Thrusting above the pandanas canopy were antennae, flagpoles, deep-sea fishing rods, fish spears,


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radar, and a satellite uplink. Below the canopy, where Torbiong could command the boat from an
elaborately carved throne of breadfruit-tree wood, were the engine and rudder controls, radio,
audio, and video sets, a collection of large audio speakers, a depth finder, a satellite
navigation relay, and radar. Attached to the uprights that supported the canopy were whistles
tuned to make an eerie, discordant wailing noise when the boat was at speed.

Torbiong was fond of discordant wailing noises. As Michelle swam closer, she heard the driving,
screeching electronic music that Torbiong loved trickling from the earpieces of his headset–he
normally howled it out of speakers, but when sitting still he didn’t want to scare the fish. At
night, she could hear Torbiong for miles, as he raced over the darkened sea blasted out of his
skull on betel-nut juice with his music thundering and the whistles shrieking.

He removed the headset, releasing a brief audio onslaught before switching off his sound system.

"You’re going to make yourself deaf," Michelle said.

Torbiong grinned. "Love that music. Gets the blood moving."

Michelle floated to the boat and put a hand on the gunwale between a pair of cowries.

"I saw that boy of yours on the news," Torbiong said. "He’s making you famous."

"I don’t want to be famous."

"He doesn’t understand why you don’t talk to him."

"He’s dead," Michelle said.

Torbiong made a spreading gesture with his hands. "That’s a matter of opinion."

"Watch your head," said Michelle.

Torbiong ducked as a gust threatened to bring him into contact with a pitcher plant that drooped
over the edge of the island’s overhang. Torbiong evaded the plant and then stepped to the bow to
haul in his mooring line before the boat’s canopy got caught beneath the overhang,

Michelle submerged and swam till she reached her banyan tree, then surfaced and called down her
rope elevator. By the time Torbiong’s boat hissed up to her, she’d folded away her gills and wings
and was sitting in the sling, kicking her legs over the water.

Torbiong handed her a bag of supplies: some rice, tea, salt, vegetables, and fruit. For the last
several weeks Michelle had experienced a craving for blueberries, which didn’t grow here, and
Torbiong had included a large package fresh off the shuttle, and a small bottle of cream to go
with them. Michelle thanked him.

"Most tourists want corn chips or something," Torbiong said pointedly.

"I’m not a tourist." Michelle said. "I’m sorry I don’t have any fish to swap–I’ve been hunting
smaller game." She held out the specimen bag, still dripping sea water.

Torbiong gestured toward the cooler built into the back of his boat. "I got some chai and a
chersuuch today," he said, using the local names for barracuda and mahi mahi.

"Good fishing."

"Trolling." With a shrug. He looked up at her, a quizzical look on his face. "I’ve got some calls
from reporters," he said, and then his betel-stained smile broke out. "I always make sure to send
them tourist literature."

"I’m sure they enjoy reading it."

Torbiong’s grin widened. "You get lonely, now," he said, "you come visit the family. We’ll give
you a home-cooked meal."




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She smiled. "Thanks."

They said their farewells and Torbiong’s boat hissed away on its jets, the whistles building to an
eerie, spine-shivering chord. Michelle rose into the trees and stashed her specimens and
groceries. With a bowl of blueberries and cream, Michelle crossed the rope walkway to her deck,
and checked the progress of her search spiders.

There were pointers to a swarm of articles about the death of Terzian’s wife, and Michelle wished
she’d given her spiders clearer instructions about dates.

The spiders had come up with three pictures. One was a not-very-well focused tourist video from
July 10, showing a man standing in front of the Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence. A statue of
Dante, also not in focus, gloomed down at him from beneath thick-bellied rain clouds. As the
camera panned across him, he stood with his back to the camera, but turned to the right, one leg
turned out as he scowled down at the ground–the profile was a little smeared, but the big, broad-
shouldered body seemed right. The software reckoned that there was a 78 percent chance that the
man was Terzian.

Michelle got busy refining the image, and after a few passes of the software, decided the chances
of the figure being Terzian were more on the order of 95 percent.

So maybe Terzian had gone on a Grand Tour of European cultural sites. He didn’t look happy in the
video, but then the day was rainy and Terzian didn’t have an umbrella.

And his wife had died, of course.

Now that Michelle had a date and a place she refined the instructions from her search spiders to
seek out images from Florence a week either way from July 3, and then expand the search from
there, first all Tuscany, then all Italy.

If Terzian was doing tourist sites, then she surely had him nailed.

The next two hits, from her earlier research spiders, were duds. The software gave a less than 50
percent chance of Terzian’s being in Lisbon or Cape Sounion, and refinements of the image reduced
the chance to something near zero.

Then the next video popped up, with a time stamp right there in the image–Paris, June 26, 13:41:44
hours, just a day before Terzian bought a bankroll of Euros and vanished.

<Bingo!> Michelle’s fingers formed.

The first thing Michelle saw was Terzian walking out of the frame–no doubt this time that it was
him. He was looking over his shoulder at a small crowd of people. There was a dark-haired woman
huddled on his arm, her face turned away from the camera. Michelle’s heart warmed at the thought
of the lonely widower Terzian having an affair in the City of Love.

Then she followed Terzian’s gaze to see what had so drawn his attention. A dead man stretched out
on the pavement, surrounded by hapless bystanders.

And then, as the scene slowly settled into her astonished mind, the video sang at her in the
piping voice of Pan.

Terzian looked at his audience as anger raged in his backbrain. A wooden chair creaked, and the
sound spurred Terzian to wonder how long the silence had gone on. Even the Slovenian woman who had
been drowsing realized that something had changed, and blinked herself to alertness.

"I’m sorry," he said in French. "But my wife just died, and I don’t feel like playing this game
any more."

His silent audience watched as he gathered his papers, put them in his case, and left the lecture
room, his feet making sharp, murderous sounds on the wooden floor.

Yet up to that point his paper had been going all right. He’d been uncertain about commenting on
Baudrillard in Baudrillard’s own country, and in Baudrillard’s own language, a cheery compare-and-


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contrast exercise between Baudrillard’s "the self does not exist" and Rorty’s "I don’t care," the
stereotypical French and American answers to modern life. There had been seven in his audience,
perched on creaking wooden chairs, and none of them had gone to sleep, or walked out, or condemned
him for his audacity.

Yet, as he looked at his audience and read on, Terzian had felt the anger growing, spawned by the
sensation of his own uselessness. Here he was, in the City of Light, its every cobblestone a
monument to European civilization, and he was in a dreary lecture hall on the Left Bank, reading
to his audience of seven from a paper that was nothing more than a footnote, and a footnote to a
footnote at that. To come to the land of cogito ergo sum and to answer, I don’t care?

I came to Paris for this? he thought. To read this drivel? I paid for the privilege of doing this?

I do care, he thought as his feet turned toward the Seine. Desiderio, ergo sum, if he had his
Latin right. I am in pain, and therefore I do exist.

He ended in a Norman restaurant on the Ile de la Cité, with lunch as his excuse and the thought of
getting hopelessly drunk not far from his thoughts. He had absolutely nothing to do until August,
after which he would return to the States and collect his belongings from the servants’ quarters
of the house on Esplanade, and then he would go about looking for a job.

He wasn’t certain whether he would be more depressed by finding a job or by not finding one.

You are alive, he told himself. You are alive and in Paris with the whole summer ahead of you, and
you’re eating the cuisine of Normandy in the Place Dauphine. And if that isn’t a command to be
joyful, what is?

It was then that the Peruvian band began to play. Terzian looked up from his plate in weary
surprise.

When Terzian had been a child his parents–both university professors–had first taken him to
Europe, and he’d seen then that every European city had its own Peruvian or Bolivian street band,
Indians in black bowler hats and colorful blankets crouched in some public place, gazing with
impassive brown eyes from over their guitars and reed flutes.

Now, a couple of decades later, the musicians were still here, though they’d exchanged the
blankets and bowler hats for European styles, and their presentation had grown more slick. Now
they had amps, and cassettes and CDs for sale. Now they had congregated in the triangular Place
Dauphine, overshadowed by the neo-classical mass of the Palais de Justice, and commenced a Latin-
flavored medley of old Abba songs.

Maybe, after Terzian finished his veal in calvados sauce, he’d go up to the band and kick in their
guitars.

The breeze flapped the canvas overhead. Terzian looked at his empty plate. The food had been
excellent, but he could barely remember tasting it.

Anger still roiled beneath his thoughts. And–for God’s sake–was that band now playing Oasis? Those
chords were beginning to sound suspiciously like "Wonderwall." "Wonderwall" on Spanish guitars,
reed flutes, and a mandolin!

Terzian had nearly decided to call for a bottle of cognac and stay here all afternoon, but not
with that noise in the park. He put some euros on the table, anchoring the bills with a saucer
against the fresh spring breeze that rattled the green canvas canopy over his head. He was
stepping through the restaurant’s little wrought-iron gate to the sidewalk when the scuffle caught
his attention.

The man falling into the street, his face pinched with pain. The hands of the three men on either
side who were, seemingly, unable to keep their friend erect.

Idiots, Terzian thought, fury blazing in him.

There was a sudden shrill of tires, of an auto horn.



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Papers streamed in the wind as they spilled from a briefcase.

And over it all came the amped sound of pan pipes from the Peruvian band. Wonderwall.

Terzian watched in exasperated surprise as the three men sprang after the papers. He took a step
toward the fallen man–someone had to take charge here. The fallen man’s hair had spilled in a
shock over his forehead and he’d curled on his side, his face still screwed up in pain.

The pan pipes played on, one distinct hollow shriek after another.

Terzian stopped with one foot still on the sidewalk and looked around at faces that all registered
the same sense of shock. Was there a doctor here? he wondered. A French doctor? All his French
seemed to have just drained from his head. Even such simple questions as Are you all right? and
How are you feeling? seemed beyond him now. The first aid course he’d taken in his Kenpo school
was ages ago.

Unnaturally pale, the fallen man’s face relaxed. The wind floated his shock of thinning dark hair
over his face. In the park, Terzian saw a man in a baseball cap panning a video camera, and his
anger suddenly blazed up again at the fatuous uselessness of the tourist, the uselessness that
mirrored his own.

Suddenly there was a crowd around the casualty, people coming out of stopped cars, off the
sidewalk. Down the street, Terzian saw the distinctive flat-topped kepis of a pair of policemen
bobbing toward him from the direction of the Palais de Justice, and felt a surge of relief.
Someone more capable than this lot would deal with this now.

He began, hesitantly, to step away. And then his arm was seized by a pair of hands and he looked
in surprise at the woman who had just huddled her face into his shoulder, cinnamon-dark skin and
eyes invisible beneath wraparound shades.

"Please," she said in English a bit too musical to be American. "Take me out of here."

The sound of the reed pipes followed them as they made their escape.

***

He walked her past the statue of the Vert Galant himself, good old lecherous Henri IV, and onto
the Pont Neuf. To the left, across the Seine, the Louvre glowed in mellow colors beyond a screen
of plane trees.

Traffic roared by, a stampede of steel unleashed by a green light. Unfocused anger blazed in his
mind. He didn’t want this woman attached to him, and he suspected she was running some kind of
scam. The gym bag she wore on a strap over one shoulder kept banging him on the ass.
Surreptitiously, he slid his hand into his right front trouser pocket to make sure his money was
still there.

Wonderwall, he thought. Christ.

He supposed he should offer some kind of civilized comment, just in case the woman was genuinely
distressed.

"I suppose he’ll be all right," he said, half-barking the words in his annoyance and anger.

The woman’s face was still half-buried in his shoulder. "He’s dead," she murmured into his jacket.
"Couldn’t you tell?"

For Terzian, death had never occurred under the sky, but shut away, in hospice rooms with crisp
sheets and warm colors and the scent of disinfectant. In an explosion of tumors and wasting limbs
and endless pain masked only in part by morphia.

He thought of the man’s pale face, the sudden relaxation.

Yes, he thought, death came with a sigh.


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Reflex kept him talking. "The police were coming," he said. "They’ll–they’ll call an ambulance or
something."

"I only hope they catch the bastards who did it," she said.

Terzian’s heart gave a jolt as he recalled the three men who let the victim fall, and then dashed
through the square for his papers. For some reason, all he could remember about them were their
black-laced boots, with thick soles.

"Who were they?" he asked blankly.

The woman’s shades slid down her nose, and Terzian saw startling green eyes narrowed to murderous
slits. "I suppose they think of themselves as cops," she said.

Terzian parked his companion in a café near Les Halles, within sight of the dome of the Bourse.
She insisted on sitting indoors, not on the sidewalk, and on facing the front door so that she
could scan whoever came in. She put her gym bag, with its white Nike swoosh, on the floor between
the table legs and the wall, but Terzian noticed she kept its shoulder strap in her lap, as if she
might have to bolt at any moment.

Terzian kept his wedding ring within her sight. He wanted her to see it; it might make things
simpler.

Her hands were trembling. Terzian ordered coffee for them both. "No," she said suddenly. "I want
ice cream."

Terzian studied her as she turned to the waiter and ordered in French. She was around his own age,
twenty-nine. There was no question that she was a mixture of races, but which races? The flat nose
could be African or Asian or Polynesian, and Polynesia was again confirmed by the black, thick
brows. Her smooth brown complexion could be from anywhere but Europe, but her pale green eyes were
nothing but European. Her broad, sensitive mouth suggested Nubia. The black ringlets yanked into a
knot behind her head could be African or East Indian, or, for that matter, French. The result was
too striking to be beautiful–and also too striking, Terzian thought, to belong to a successful
criminal. Those looks could be too easily identified.

The waiter left. She turned her wide eyes toward Terzian, and seemed faintly surprised that he was
still there.

"My name’s Jonathan," he said.

"I’m," hesitating, "Stephanie."

"Really?" Terzian let his skepticism show.

"Yes." She nodded, reaching in a pocket for cigarettes. "Why would I lie? It doesn’t matter if you
know my real name or not."

"Then you’d better give me the whole thing."

She held her cigarette upward, at an angle, and enunciated clearly. "Stephanie América Pais e
Silva."

"America?"

Striking a match. "It’s a perfectly ordinary Portuguese name."

He looked at her. "But you’re not Portuguese."

"I carry a Portuguese passport."

Terzian bit back the comment, I’m sure you do.

Instead he said, "Did you know the man who was killed?"



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Stephanie nodded. The drags she took off her cigarette did not ease the tremor in her hands.

"Did you know him well?"

"Not very." She dragged in smoke again, then let the smoke out as she spoke.

"He was a colleague. A biochemist."

Surprise silenced Terzian. Stephanie tipped ash into the Cinzano ashtray, but her nervousness made
her miss, and the little tube of ash fell on the tablecloth.

"Shit," she said, and swept the ash to the floor with a nervous movement of her fingers.

"Are you a biochemist, too?" Terzian asked.

"I’m a nurse." She looked at him with her pale eyes. "I work for Santa Croce–it’s a–"

"A relief agency." A Catholic one, he remembered. The name meant Holy Cross.

She nodded.

"Shouldn’t you go to the police?" he asked. And then his skepticism returned. "Oh, that’s right–it
was the police who did the killing."

"Not the French police." She leaned across the table toward him. "This was a                              different sort of
police, the kind who think that killing someone and making an arrest are the                              same thing. You look
at the television news tonight. They’ll report the death, but there won’t be                              any arrests. Or any
suspects." Her face darkened, and she leaned back in her chair to consider a                              new thought. "Unless
they somehow manage to blame it on me."

Terzian remembered papers flying in the spring wind, men in heavy boots sprinting after. The
pinched, pale face of the victim.

"Who, then?"

She gave him a bleak look through a curl of cigarette smoke. "Have you ever heard of
Transnistria?"

Terzian hesitated, then decided "No" was the most sensible answer.

"The murderers are Transnistrian." A ragged smile drew itself across Stephanie’s face. "Their
intellectual property police. They killed Adrian over a copyright."

At that point, the waiter brought Terzian’s coffee, along with Stephanie’s order. Hers was
colossal, a huge glass goblet filled with pastel-colored ice creams and fruit syrups in bright
primary colors, topped by a mountain of cream and a toy pinwheel on a candy-striped stick.
Stephanie looked at the creation in shock, her eyes wide.

"I love ice cream," she choked, and then her eyes brimmed with tears and she began to cry.

Stephanie wept for a while, across the table, and, between sobs, choked down heaping spoonfuls of
ice cream, eating in great gulps and swiping at her lips and tear-stained cheeks with a paper
napkin.

The waiter stood quietly in the corner, but from his glare and the set of his jaw it was clear
that he blamed Terzian for making the lovely woman cry.

Terzian felt his body surge with the impulse to aid her, but he didn’t know what to do. Move
around the table and put an arm around her? Take her hand? Call someone to take her off his hands?

The latter, for preference.

He settled for handing her a clean napkin when her own grew sodden.



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His skepticism had not survived the mention of the Transnistrian copyright police. This was far
too bizarre to be a con–a scam was based on basic human desire, greed, or lust, not something as
abstract as intellectual property. Unless there was a gang who made a point of targeting academics
from the States, luring them with a tantalizing hook about a copyright worth murdering for. . . .

Eventually, the storm subsided. Stephanie pushed the half-consumed ice cream away, and reached for
another cigarette.

He tapped his wedding ring on the table top, something he did when thinking. "Shouldn’t you
contact the local police?" he asked. "You know something about this . . . death." For some reason
he was reluctant to use the word murder. It was as if using the word would make something true,
not the killing itself but his relationship to the killing . . . to call it murder would grant it
some kind of power over him.

She shook her head. "I’ve got to get out of France before those guys find me. Out of Europe, if I
can, but that would be hard. My passport’s in my hotel room, and they’re probably watching it."

"Because of this copyright."

Her mouth twitched in a half-smile. "That’s right."

"It’s not a literary copyright, I take it."

She shook her head, the half-smile still on her face.

"Your friend was a biologist." He felt a hum in his nerves, a certainty that he already knew the
answer to the next question.

"Is it a weapon?" he asked.

She wasn’t surprised by the question. "No," she said. "No, just the opposite." She took a drag on
her cigarette and sighed the smoke out. "It’s an antidote. An antidote to human folly."

"Listen," Stephanie said. "Just because the Soviet Union fell doesn’t mean that Sovietism fell
with it. Sovietism is still there–the only difference is that its moral justification is gone, and
what’s left is violence and extortion disguised as law enforcement and taxation. The old empire
breaks up, and in the West you think it’s great, but more countries just meant more palms to be
greased–all throughout the former Soviet empire you’ve got more ‘inspectors’ and ‘tax collectors,’
more ‘customs agents’ and ‘security directorates’ than there ever were under the Russians. All
these people do is prey off their own populations, because no one else will do business with them
unless they’ve got oil or some other resource that people want."

"Trashcanistans," Terzian said. It was a word he’d heard used of his own ancestral homeland, the
former Soviet Republic of Armenia, whose looted economy and paranoid, murderous, despotic Russian
puppet regime was supported only by millions of dollars sent to the country by Americans of
Armenian descent, who thought that propping up the gang of thugs in power somehow translated into
freedom for the fatherland.

Stephanie nodded. "And the worst Trashcanistan of all is Transnistria."

She and Terzian had left the café and taken a taxi back to the Left Bank and Terzian’s hotel. He
had turned the television to a local station, but muted the sound until the news came on. Until
then the station showed a rerun of an American cop show, stolid, businesslike detectives
underplaying their latest sordid confrontation with tragedy.

The hotel room hadn’t been built for the queen-sized bed it now held, and there was an eighteen-
inch clearance around the bed and no room for chairs. Terzian, not wanting Stephanie to think he
wanted to get her in the sack, perched uncertainly on a corner of the bed, while Stephanie
disposed herself more comfortably, sitting cross-legged in its center.

"Moldova was a Soviet republic put together by Stalin," she said. "It was made up of Bessarabia,
which was a part of Romania that Stalin chewed off at the beginning of the Second World War, plus
a strip of industrial land on the far side of the Dniester. When the Soviet Union went down,



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Moldova became ‘independent’–" Terzian could hear the quotes in her voice. "But independence had
nothing to do with the Moldovan people, it was just Romanian-speaking Soviet elites going off on
their own account once their own superiors were no longer there to restrain them. And Moldova soon
split–first the Turkish Christians . . ."

"Wait a second," Terzian said. "There are Christian Turks?"

The idea of Christian Turks was not a part of his Armenian-American worldview.

Stephanie nodded. "Orthodox Christian Turks, yes. They’re called Gagauz, and they now have their
own autonomous republic of Gagauzia within Moldova."

Stephanie reached into her pocket for a cigarette and her lighter.

"Uh," Terzian said. "Would you mind smoking out the window?"

Stephanie made a face. "Americans," she said, but she moved to the window and opened it, letting
in a blast of cool spring air. She perched on the windowsill, sheltered her cigarette from the
wind, and lit up.

"Where was I?" she asked.

"Turkish Christians."

"Right." Blowing smoke into the teeth of the gale. "Gagauzia was only the start–after that, a
Russian general allied with a bunch of crooks and KGB types created a rebellion in the bit of
Moldova that was on the far side of the Dniester–another collection of Soviet elites, representing
no one but themselves. Once the Russian-speaking rebels rose against their Romanian-speaking
oppressors, the Soviet Fourteenth Army stepped in as ‘peacekeepers,’ complete with blue helmets,
and created a twenty-mile-wide state recognized by no other government. And that meant more
military, more border guards, more administrators, more taxes to charge, and customs duties, and
uniformed ex-Soviets whose palms needed greasing. And over a hundred thousand refugees who could
be put in camps while the administration stole their supplies and rations. . . .

"But–" She jabbed the cigarette like a pointer. "Transnistria had a problem. No other nation
recognized their existence, and they were tiny and had no natural resources, barring the underage
girls they enslaved by the thousands to export for prostitution. The rest of the population was
leaving as fast as they could, restrained only slightly by the fact that they carried passports no
other state recognized, and that meant there were fewer people whose productivity the elite could
steal to support their predatory post-Soviet lifestyles. All they had was a lot of obsolete Soviet
heavy industry geared to produce stuff no one wanted.

"But they still had the infrastructure. They had power plants–running off Russian oil they
couldn’t afford to buy–and they had a transportation system. So the outlaw regime set up to
attract other outlaws who needed industrial capacity–the idea was that they’d attract
entrepreneurs who were excused paying most of the local ‘taxes’ in exchange for making one big
payoff to the higher echelon."

"Weapons?" Terzian asked.

"Weapons, sure," Stephanie nodded. "Mostly they’re producing cheap knockoffs of other people’s
guns, but the guns are up to the size of howitzers. They tried banking and data havens, but the
authorities couldn’t restrain themselves from ripping those off–banks and data run on trust and
control of information, and when the regulators are greedy, short-sighted crooks, you don’t get
either one. So what they settled on was, well, biotech. They’ve got companies creating cheap
generic pharmaceuticals that evade Western patents. . . ." Her look darkened. "Not that I’ve got a
problem with that, not when I’ve seen thousands dying of diseases they couldn’t afford to cure.
And they’ve also got other companies who are ripping off Western genetic research to develop their
own products. And as long as they make their payoffs to the elite, these companies remain
completely unregulated. Nobody, not even the government, knows what they’re doing in those
factories, and the government gives them security free of charge."

Terzian imagined gene-splicing going on in a rusting Soviet factory, rows and rows of mutant


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plants with untested, unregulated genetics, all set to be released on an unsuspecting world.
Transgenic elements drifting down the Dniester to the Black Sea, growing quietly in its saline
environment. . . .

"The news," Stephanie reminded, and pointed at the television.

Terzian reached for the control and hit the mute button, just as the throbbing, anxious music that
announced the news began to fade.

The murder on the Ile de la Cité was the second item on the broadcast. The victim was described as
a "foreign national" who had been fatally stabbed, and no arrests had been made. The motive for
the killing was unknown.

Terzian changed the channel in time to catch the same item on another channel. The story was
unchanged.

"I told you," Stephanie said. "No suspects. No motive."

"You could tell them."

She made a negative motion with her cigarette. "I couldn’t tell them who did it, or how to find
them. All I could do is put myself under suspicion."

Terzian turned off the TV. "So what happened exactly? Your friend stole from these people?"

Stephanie swiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. "He stole something that was of no value
to them. It’s only valuable to poor people, who can’t afford to pay. And–" She turned to the
window and spun her cigarette into the street below. "I’ll take it out of here as soon as I can,"
she said. "I’ve got to try to contact some people." She closed the window, shutting out the spring
breeze. "I wish I had my passport. That would change everything."

I saw a murder this afternoon, Terzian thought. He closed his eyes and saw the man falling, the
white face so completely absorbed in the reality of its own agony.

He was so fucking sick of death.

He opened his eyes. "I can get your passport back," he said.

Anger kept him moving until he saw the killers, across the street from Stephanie’s hotel, sitting
at an outdoor table in a café-bar. Terzian recognized them immediately–he didn’t need to look at
the heavy shoes, or the broad faces with their disciplined military mustaches–one glance at the
crowd at the café showed the only two in the place who weren’t French. That was probably how
Stephanie knew to speak to him in English, he just didn’t dress or carry himself like a Frenchman,
for all that he’d worn an anonymous coat and tie. He tore his gaze away before they saw him gaping
at them.

Anger turned very suddenly to fear, and as he continued his stride toward the hotel he told
himself that they wouldn’t recognize him from the Norman restaurant, that he’d changed into blue
jeans and sneakers and a windbreaker, and carried a soft-sided suitcase. Still he felt a gunsight
on the back of his neck, and he was so nervous that he nearly ran head-first into the glass lobby
door.

Terzian paid for a room with his credit card, took the key from the Vietnamese clerk, and walked
up the narrow stair to what the French called the second floor, but what he would have called the
third. No one lurked in the stairwell, and he wondered where the third assassin had gone. Looking
for Stephanie somewhere else, probably, an airport or train station.

In his room Terzian put his suitcase on the bed–it held only a few token items, plus his shaving
kit–and then he took Stephanie’s key from his pocket and held it in his hand. The key was simple,
attached to a weighted doorknob-shaped ceramic plug.

The jolt of fear and surprise that had so staggered him on first sighting the two men began to
shift again into rage.



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They were drinking beer, there had been half-empty mugs on the table in front of them, and a pair
of empties as well.

Drinking on duty. Doing surveillance while drunk.

Bastards. Trashcanians. They could kill someone simply through drunkenness.

Perhaps they already had.

He was angry when he left his room and took the stairs to the floor below. No foes kept watch in
the hall. He opened Stephanie’s room and then closed the door behind him.

He didn’t turn on the light. The sun was surprisingly high in the sky for the hour: he had noticed
that the sun seemed to set later here than it did at home. Maybe France was very far to the west
for its time zone.

Stephanie didn’t have a suitcase, just a kind of nylon duffel, a larger version of the athletic
bag she already carried. He took it from the little closet, and enough of Terzian’s suspicion
remained so that he checked the luggage tag to make certain the name was Steph. Pais, and not
another.

He opened the duffel, then got her passport and travel documents from the bedside table and tossed
them in. He added a jacket and a sweater from the closet, then packed her toothbrush and shaver
into her plastic travel bag and put it in the duffel.

The plan was for him to return to his room on the upper floor and stay the night and avoid raising
suspicion by leaving a hotel he’d just checked into. In the morning, carrying two bags, he’d check
out and rejoin Stephanie in his own hotel, where she had spent the night in his room, and where
the air would by now almost certainly reek with her cigarette smoke.

Terzian opened a dresser drawer and scooped out a double handful of Stephanie’s T-shirts,
underwear, and stockings, and then he remembered that the last time he’d done this was when he
cleaned Claire’s belongings out of the Esplanade house.

Shit. Fuck. He gazed down at the clothing between his hands and let the fury rage like a tempest
in his skull.

And then, in the angry silence, he heard a creak in the corridor, and then a stumbling thud.

Thick rubber military soles, he thought. With drunk baboons in them.

Instinct shrieked at him not to be trapped in this room, this dead-end where he could be trapped
and killed. He dropped Stephanie’s clothes back into the drawer and stepped to the bed and picked
up the duffel in one hand. Another step took him to the door, which he opened with one hand while
using the other to fling the duffel into the surprised face of the drunken murderer on the other
side.

Terzian hadn’t been at his Kenpo school in six years, not since he’d left Kansas City, but certain
reflexes don’t go away after they’ve been drilled into a person thousands of times–certainly not
the front kick that hooked upward under the intruder’s breastbone and drove him breathless into
the corridor wall opposite.

A primitive element of his mind rejoiced in the fact that he was bigger than these guys. He could
really knock them around.

The second Trashcanian tried to draw a pistol, but Terzian passed outside the pistol hand and
drove the point of an elbow into the man’s face. Terzian then grabbed the automatic with both
hands, took a further step down the corridor, and spun around, which swung the man around
Terzian’s hip a full two hundred and seventy degrees and drove him head-first into the corridor
wall. When he’d finished falling and opened his eyes he was staring into the barrel of his own
gun.

Red rage gave a fangs-bared roar of animal triumph inside Terzian’s skull. Perhaps his tongue
echoed it. It was all he could do to stop himself from pulling the trigger.


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Get Death working for him for a change. Why not?

Except that the first man hadn’t realized that his side had just lost. He had drawn a knife–a
glittering chromed single-edged thing that may have already killed once today–and now he took a
dangerous step toward Terzian.

Terzian pointed the pistol straight at the knife man and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

The intruder stared at the gun as if he’d just realized at just this moment it wasn’t his partner
who held it.

Terzian pulled the trigger again, and when nothing happened his rage melted into terror and he
ran. Behind him he heard the drunken knife man trip over his partner and crash to the floor.

Terzian was at the bottom of the stair before he heard the thick-soled military boots clatter on
the risers above him. He dashed through the small lobby–he sensed the Vietnamese night clerk, who
was facing away, begin to turn toward him just as he pushed open the glass door and ran into the
street.

He kept running. At some point he discovered the gun still in his fist, and he put it in the
pocket of his windbreaker.

Some moments later, he realized that he wasn’t being pursued. And he remembered that Stephanie’s
passport was still in her duffel, which he’d thrown at the knife man and hadn’t retrieved.

For a moment, rage ran through him, and he thought about taking out the gun and fixing whatever
was wrong with it and going back to Stephanie’s room and getting the documents one way or another.

But then the anger faded enough for him to see what a foolish course that would be, and he
returned to his own hotel.

***

Terzian had given Stephanie his key, so he knocked on his own door before realizing she was very
unlikely to open to a random knock. "It’s Jonathan," he said. "It didn’t work out."

She snatched the door open from the inside. Her face was taut with anxiety. She held pages in her
hand, the text of the paper he’d delivered that morning.

"Sorry," he said. "They were there, outside the hotel. I got into your room, but–"

She took his arm and almost yanked him into the room, then shut the door behind him. "Did they
follow you?" she demanded.

"No. They didn’t chase me. Maybe they thought I’d figure out how to work the gun." He took the
pistol out of his pocket and showed it to her. "I can’t believe how stupid I was–"

"Where did you get that? Where did you get that?" Her voice was nearly a scream, and she shrank
away from him, her eyes wide. Her fist crumpled papers over her heart. To his astonishment, he
realized that she was afraid of him, that she thought he was connected, somehow, with the killers.

He threw the pistol onto the bed and raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. "No really!" he
shouted over her cries. "It’s not mine! I took it from one of them!"

Stephanie took a deep gasp of air. Her eyes were still wild. "Who the hell are you, then?" she
said. "James Bond?"

He gave a disgusted laugh. "James Bond would have known how to shoot."

"I was reading your–your article." She held out the pages toward him. "I was thinking, my God, I
was thinking, what have I got this poor guy into. Some professor I was sending to his death." She
passed a hand over her forehead. "They probably bugged my room. They would have known right away
that someone was in it."


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"They were drunk," Terzian said. "Maybe they’ve been drinking all day. Those assholes really
pissed me off."

He sat on the bed and picked up the pistol. It was small and blue steel and surprisingly heavy. In
the years since he’d last shot a gun, he had forgotten that purposefulness, the way a firearm was
designed for a single, clear function. He found the safety where it had been all along, near his
right thumb, and flicked it off and then on again.

"There," he said. "That’s what I should have done."

Waves of anger shivered through his limbs at the touch of the adrenaline still pouring into his
system. A bitter impulse to laugh again rose in him, and he tried to suppress it.

"I guess I was lucky after all," he said. "It wouldn’t have done you any good to have to explain a
pair of corpses outside your room." He looked up at Stephanie, who was pacing back and forth in
the narrow lane between the bed and the wall, and looking as if she badly needed a cigarette. "I’m
sorry about your passport. Where were you going to go, anyway?"

"It doesn’t so much matter if I go," she said. She gave Terzian a quick, nervous glance. "You can
fly it out, right?"

"It?" He stared at her. "What do you mean, it?"

"The biotech." Stephanie stopped her pacing and stared at him with those startling green eyes.
"Adrian gave it to me. Just before they killed him." Terzian’s gaze followed hers to the black bag
with the Nike swoosh, the bag that sat at the foot of Terzian’s bed.

Terzian’s impulse to laugh faded. Unregulated, illegal, stolen biotech, he thought. Right in his
own hotel room. Along with a stolen gun and a woman who was probably out of her mind.

Fuck.

The dead man was identified by news files as Adrian Cristea, a citizen of Ukraine and a
researcher. He had been stabbed once in the right kidney and bled to death without identifying his
assailants. Witnesses reported two or maybe three men leaving the scene immediately after
Cristea’s death. Michelle set more search spiders to work.

For a moment, she considered calling Davout and letting him know that Terzian had probably been a
witness to a murder, but decided to wait until she had some more evidence one way or another.

For the next few hours, she did her real work, analyzing the samples she’d taken from Zigzag
Lake’s sulphide-tainted deeps. It wasn’t very physical, and Michelle figured it was only worth a
few hundred calories.

A wind floated through the treetops, bringing the scent of night flowers and swaying Michelle’s
perch beneath her as she peered into her biochemical reader, and she remembered the gentle
pressure of Darton against her back, rocking with her as he looked over her shoulder at her
results. Suddenly she could remember, with a near-perfect clarity, the taste of his skin on her
tongue.

She rose from her woven seat and paced along the bough. Damn it, she thought, I watched you die.

Michelle returned to her deck and discovered that her spiders had located the police file on
Cristea’s death. A translation program handled the antique French without trouble, even producing
modern equivalents of forensic jargon. Cristea was of Romanian descent, had been born in the old
USSR, and had acquired Ukranian citizenship on the breakup of the Soviet Union. The French files
themselves had translations of Cristea’s Ukranian travel documents, which included receipts
showing that he had paid personal insurance, environmental insurance, and departure taxes from
Transnistria, a place of which she’d never heard, as well as similar documents from Moldova, which
at least was a province, or country, that sounded familiar.

What kind of places were these, where you had to buy insurance at the border? And what was
environmental insurance anyway?


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There were copies of emails between French and Ukranian authorities, in which the Ukranians
politely declined any knowledge of their citizen beyond the fact that he was a citizen. They had
no addresses for him.

Cristea apparently lived in Transnistria, but the authorities there echoed the Ukranians in saying
they knew nothing of him.

Cristea’s tickets and vouchers showed that he had apparently taken a train to Bucharest, and there
he’d got on an airline that took him to Prague, and thence to Paris. He had been in the city less
than a day before he was killed. Found in Cristea’s hotel room was a curious document certifying
that Cristea was carrying medical supplies, specifically a vaccine against hepatitis A. Michelle
wondered why he would be carrying a hepatitis vaccine from Transnistria to France. France
presumably had all the hepatitis vaccine it needed.

No vaccine had turned up. Apparently Cristea had got into the European Community without having
his bags searched, as there was no evidence that the documents relating to the alleged vaccine had
ever been examined.

The missing "vaccine"–at some point in the police file the skeptical quotation marks had
appeared–had convinced the Paris police that Cristea was a murdered drug courier, and at that
point they’d lost interest in the case. It was rarely possible to solve a professional killing in
the drug underworld.

Michelle’s brief investigation seemed to have come to a dead end. That Terzian might have
witnessed a murder would rate maybe half a sentence in Professor Davout’s biography.

Then she checked what her spiders had brought her in regard to Terzian, and found something that
cheered her.

There he was inside the Basilica di Santa Croce, a tourist still photograph taken before the tomb
of Machiavelli. He was only slightly turned away from the camera and the face was unmistakable.
Though there was no date on the photograph, only the year, though he wore the same clothes he wore
in the video taken outside the church, and the photo caught him in the act of speaking to a
companion. She was a tall woman with deep brown skin, but she was turned away from the camera, and
a wide-brimmed sun hat made her features indistinguishable.

Humming happily, Michelle deployed her software to determine whether this was the same woman who
had been on Terzian’s arm on the Place Dauphine. Without facial features or other critical
measurements to compare, the software was uncertain, but the proportion of limb and thorax was
right, and the software gave an estimate of 41 percent, which Michelle took to be encouraging.

Another still image of Terzian appeared in an undated photograph taken at a festival in southern
France. He wore dark glasses, and he’d grown heavily tanned; he carried a glass of wine in either
hand, but the person to whom he was bringing the second glass was out of the frame. Michelle set
her software to locating the identity of the church seen in the background, a task the two
distinctive belltowers would make easy. She was lucky and got a hit right away: the church was the
Eglise St-Michel in Salon-de-Provence, which meant Terzian had attended the Fête des Aires de la
Dine in June. Michelle set more search spiders to seeking out photo and video from the festivals.
She had no doubt that she’d find Terzian there, and perhaps again his companion.

Michelle retired happily to her hammock. The search was going well. Terzian had met a woman in
Paris and traveled with her for weeks. The evidence wasn’t quite there yet, but Michelle would
drag it out of history somehow.

Romance. The lonely mermaid was in favor of romance, the kind where you ran away to faraway places
to be more intently one with the person you adored.

It was what she herself had done, before everything had gone so wrong, and Michelle had had to
take steps to re-establish the moral balance of her universe.

Terzian paid for a room for Stephanie for the night, not so much because he was gallant as because
he needed to be alone to think. "There’s a breakfast buffet downstairs in the morning," he said.


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"They have hard-boiled eggs and croissants and Nutella. It’s a very un-French thing to do. I
recommend it."

He wondered if he would ever see her again. She might just vanish, particularly if she read his
thoughts, because another reason for wanting privacy was so that he could call the police and
bring an end to this insane situation.

He never quite assembled the motivation to make the call. Perhaps Rorty’s I don’t care had rubbed
off on him. And he never got a chance to taste the buffet, either. Stephanie banged on his door
very early, and he dragged on his jeans and opened the door. She entered, furiously smoking from
her new cigarette pack, the athletic bag over her shoulder.

"How did you pay for the room at my hotel?" she asked.

"Credit card," he said, and in the stunned, accusing silence that followed he saw his James Bond
fantasies sink slowly beneath the slack, oily surface of a dismal lake.

Because credit cards leave trails. The Transnistrians would have checked the hotel registry, and
the credit card impression taken by the hotel, and now they knew who he was. And it wouldn’t be
long before they’d trace him at this hotel.

"Shit, I should have warned you to pay cash." Stephanie stalked to the window and peered out
cautiously. "They could be out there right now."

Terzian felt a sudden compulsion to have the gun in his hand. He took it from the bedside table
and stood there, feeling stupid and cold and shirtless.

"How much money do you have?" Terzian asked.

"Couple of hundred."

"I have less."

"You should max out your credit card and just carry Euros. Use your card now before they cancel
it."

"Cancel it? How could they cancel it?"

She gave him a tight-lipped, impatient look. "Jonathan. They may be assholes, but they’re still a
government."

They took a cab to the American Express near the Opéra and Terzian got ten thousand Euros in cash
from some people who were extremely skeptical about the validity of his documents, but who had, in
the end, to admit that all was technically correct. Then Stephanie got a cell phone under the name
A. Silva, with a bunch of prepaid hours on it, and within a couple of hours they were on the TGV,
speeding south to Nice at nearly two hundred seventy kilometers per hour, all with a strange
absence of sound and vibration that made the French countryside speeding past seem like a
strangely unconvincing special effect.

Terzian had put them in first class and he and Stephanie were alone in a group of four seats.
Stephanie was twitchy because he hadn’t bought seats in a smoking section. He sat uncertain,
unhappy about all the cash he was carrying and not knowing what to do with it–he’d made two big
rolls and zipped them into the pockets of his windbreaker. He carried the pistol in the front
pocket of his jeans and its weight and discomfort was a perpetual reminder of this situation that
he’d been dragged into, pursued by killers from Trashcanistan and escorting illegal biotechnology.

He kept mentally rehearsing drawing the pistol and shooting it. Over and over, remembering to
thumb off the safety this time. Just in case Trashcanian commandos stormed the train.

"Hurled into life," he muttered. "An object lesson right out of Heidegger."

"Beg pardon?"

He looked at her. "Heidegger said we’re hurled into life. Just like I’ve been hurled into–" He


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flapped his hands uselessly. "Into whatever this is. The situation exists before you even got
here, but here you are anyway, and the whole business is something you inherit and have to live
with." He felt his lips draw back in a snarl. "He also said that a fundamental feature of
existence is anxiety in the face of death, which would also seem to apply to our situation. And
his answer to all of this was to make existence, dasein if you want to get technical, an authentic
project." He looked at her. "So what’s your authentic project, then? And how authentic is it?"

Her brow furrowed. "What?"

Terzian couldn’t stop, not that he wanted to. It was just Stephanie’s hard luck that he couldn’t
shoot anybody right now, or break something up with his fists, and was compelled to lecture
instead. "Or," he went on, "to put this in a more accessible context, just pretend we’re in a
Hitchcock film, okay? This is the scene where Grace Kelly tells Cary Grant exactly who she is and
what the maguffin is."

Stephanie’s face was frozen into a hostile mask. Whether she understood what he was saying or not,
the hostility was clear.

"I don’t get it," she said.

"What’s in the fucking bag?" he demanded.

She glared at him for a long moment, then spoke, her own anger plain in her voice. "It’s the
answer to world hunger," she said. "Is that authentic enough for you?"

Stephanie’s father was from Angola and her mother from East Timor, both former Portuguese colonies
swamped in the decades since independence by war and massacre. Both parents had, with great
foresight and intelligence, retained Portuguese passports, and had met in Rome, where they worked
for UNESCO, and where Stephanie had grown up with a blend of their genetics and their service
ethic.

Stephanie herself had received a degree in administration from the University of Virginia, which
accounted for the American lights in her English, then she’d gotten another degree in nursing and
went to work for the Catholic relief agency Santa Croce, which sent her to its every war-wrecked,
locust-blighted, warlord-ridden, sandstorm-blasted camp in Africa. And a few that weren’t in
Africa.

"Trashcanistan," Terzian said.

"Moldova," Stephanie said. "For three months, on what was supposed to be my vacation." She
shuddered. "I don’t mind telling you that it was a frightening thing. I was used to that kind of
thing in Africa, but to see it all happening in the developed world . . . warlords, ethnic
hatreds, populations being moved at the point of a gun, whole forested districts being turned to
deserts because people suddenly need firewood. . . ." Her emerald eyes flashed. "It’s all
politics, okay? Just like in Africa. Famine and camps are all politics now, and have been since
before I was born. A whole population starves, and it’s because someone, somewhere, sees a profit
in it. It’s difficult to just kill an ethnic group you don’t like, war is expensive and there are
questions at the UN and you may end up at the Hague being tried for war crimes. But if you just
wait for a bad harvest and then arrange for the whole population to starve, it’s
different–suddenly your enemies are giving you all their money in return for food, you get aid
from the UN instead of grief, and you can award yourself a piece of the relief action and collect
bribes from all the relief agencies, and your enemies are rounded up into camps and you can get
your armed forces into the country without resistance, make sure your enemies disappear, control
everything while some deliveries disappear into government warehouses where the food can be sold
to the starving or just sold abroad for a profit. . . ." She shrugged. "That’s the way of the
world, okay? But no more!" She grabbed a fistful of the Nike bag and brandished it at him.

What her time in Moldova had done was to leave Stephanie contacts in the area, some in relief
agencies, some in industry and government. So that when news of a useful project came up in
Transnistria, she was among the first to know.

"So what is it?" Terzian asked. "Some kind of genetically modified food crop?"



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"No." She smiled thinly. "What we have here is a genetically modified consumer."

Those Transnistrian companies had mostly been interested in duplicating pharmaceuticals and
transgenic food crops created by other companies, producing them on the cheap and underselling the
patent-owners. There were bits and pieces of everything in those labs, DNA human and animal and
vegetable. A lot of it had other people’s trademarks and patents on it, even the human codes,
which US law permitted companies to patent provided they came up with something useful to do with
it. And what these semi-outlaw companies were doing was making two things they figured people
couldn’t do without: drugs and food.

And not just people, since animals need drugs and food, too. Starving, tubercular sheep or pigs
aren’t worth much at market, so there’s as much money in keeping livestock alive as in doing the
same for people. So at some point one of the administrators–after a few too many shots of vodka
flavored with bison grass–said, "Why should we worry about feeding the animals at all? Why not
have them grow their own food, like plants?"

So then began the Green Swine Project, an attempt to make pigs fat and happy by just herding them
out into the sun.

"Green swine," Terzian repeated, wondering. "People are getting killed over green swine."

"Well, no." Stephanie waved the idea away with a twitchy swipe of her hand. "The idea never quite
got beyond the vaporware stage, because at that point another question was asked–why swine? Adrian
said, Why stop at having animals do photosynthesis–why not people?"

"No!" Terzian cried, appalled. "You’re going to turn people green?"

Stephanie glared at him. "Something wrong with fat, happy green people?" Her hands banged out a
furious rhythm on the armrests of her seat. "I’d have skin to match my eyes. Wouldn’t that be
attractive?"

"I’d have to see it first," Terzian said, the shock still rolling through his bones.

"Adrian was pretty smart," Stephanie said. "The Transnistrians killed themselves a real genius."
She shook her head. "He had it all worked out. He wanted to limit the effect to the skin–no green
muscle tissue or skeletons–so he started with a virus that has a tropism for the
epidermis–papiloma, that’s warts, okay?"

So now we’ve got green warts, Terzian thought, but he kept his mouth shut.

"So if you’re Adrian, what you do is gut out the virus and re-encode to create chlorophyll. Once a
person’s infected, exposure to sunlight will cause the virus to replicate and chlorophyll to
reproduce in the skin."

Terzian gave Stephanie a skeptical look. "That’s not going to be very efficient," he said. "Plants
get sugars and oxygen from chlorophyll, okay, but they don’t need much food, they stand in one
place and don’t walk around. Add chlorophyll to a person’s skin, how many calories do you get each
day? Tens? Dozens?"

Stephanie’s lips parted in a fierce little smile. "You don’t stop with just the chlorophyll. You
have to get really efficient electron transport. In a plant that’s handled in the chloroplasts,
but the human body already has mitochondria to do the same job. You don’t have to create these
huge support mechanisms for the chlorophyll, you just make use of what’s already there. So if
you’re Adrian, what you do is add trafficking tags to the reaction center proteins so that they’ll
target the mitochondria, which already are loaded with proteins to handle electron transport. The
result is that the mitochondria handle transport from the chlorophyll, which is the sort of job
they do anyway, and once the virus starts replicating, you can get maybe a thousand calories or
more just from standing in the sun. It won’t provide full nutrition, but it can keep starvation at
bay, and it’s not as if starving people have much to do besides stand in the sun anyway."

"It’s not going to do much good for Icelanders," Terzian said.

She turned severe. "Icelanders aren’t starving. It so happens that most of the people in the world


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who are starving happen to be in hot places."

Terzian flapped his hands. "Fine. I must be a racist. Sue me."

Stephanie’s grin broadened, and she leaned toward Terzian. "I didn’t tell you about Adrian’s most
interesting bit of cleverness. When people start getting normal nutrition, there’ll be a
competition within the mitochondria between normal metabolism and solar-induced electron
transport. So the green virus is just a redundant backup system in case normal nutrition isn’t
available."

A triumphant smile crossed Stephanie’s face. "Starvation will no longer be a weapon," she said.
"Green skin can keep people active and on their feet long enough to get help. It will keep them
healthy enough to fend off the epidemics associated with malnutrition. The point is–" She made
fists and shook them at the sky. "The bad guys don’t get to use starvation as a weapon anymore!
Famine ends! One of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse dies, right here, right now, as a result
of what I’ve got in this bag!" She picked up the bag and threw it into Terzian’s lap, and he
jerked on the seat in defensive reflex, knees rising to meet elbows. Her lips skinned back in a
snarl, and her tone was mocking.

"I think even that Nazi fuck Heidegger would think my project is pretty damn authentic. Wouldn’t
you agree, Herr Doktor Terzian?"

Got you, Michelle thought. Here was a still photo of Terzian at the Fête des Aires de la Dine,
with the dark-skinned woman. She had the same wide-brimmed straw hat she’d worn in the Florence
church, and had the same black bag over her shoulder, but now Michelle had a clear view of a three-
quarter profile, and one hand, with its critical alignments, was clearly visible, holding an ice
cream cone.

Night insects whirled around the computer display. Michelle batted them away and got busy mapping.
The photo was digital and Michelle could enlarge it.

To her surprise, she discovered that the woman had green eyes. Black women with green irises–or
irises of orange or chartreuse or chrome steel–were not unusual in her own time, but she knew that
in Terzian’s time they were rare. That would make the search much easier.

"Michelle . . ." The voice came just as Michelle sent her new search spiders into the ether. A
shiver ran up her spine.

"Michelle . . ." The voice came again.

It was Darton.

Michelle’s heart gave a sickening lurch. She closed her console and put it back in the mesh bag,
then crossed the rope bridge between the ironwood tree and the banyan. Her knees were weak, and
the swaying bridge seemed to take a couple of unexpected pitches. She stepped out onto the
banyan’s sturdy overhanging limb and gazed out at the water.

"Michelle . . ." To the southwest, in the channel between the mermaid’s island and another, she
could see a pale light bobbing, the light of a small boat.

"Michelle, where are you?"

The voice died away in the silence and surf. Michelle remembered the spike in her hand, the long,
agonized trek up the slope above Jellyfish Lake. Darton pale, panting for breath, dying in her
arms.

The lake was one of the wonders of the world, but the steep path over the ridge that fenced the
lake from the ocean was challenging even for those who were not dying. When Michelle and Darton–at
that time, apes–came up from their boat that afternoon, they didn’t climb the steep path, but
swung hand-over-hand through the trees overhead, through the hardwood and guava trees, and avoided
the poison trees with their bleeding, allergenic black sap. Even though their trip was less
exhausting than if they’d gone over the land route, the two were ready for the cool water by the
time they arrived at the lake.


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Tens of thousands of years in the past, the water level was higher, and when it receded, the lake
was cut off from the Pacific, and with it the Mastigias sp. jellyfish, which soon exhausted the
supply of small fish that were its food. As the human race did later, the jellies gave up hunting
and gathering in exchange for agriculture, and permitted themselves to be farmed by colonies of
algae that provided the sugars they needed for life. At night, they’d descend to the bottom of the
lake, where they fertilized their algae crops in the anoxic, sulfurous waters; at dawn, the
jellies rose to the surface, and during the day, they crossed the lake, following the course of
the sun, and allowed the sun’s rays to supply the energy necessary for making their daily ration
of food.

When Darton and Michelle arrived, there were ten million jellyfish in the lake, from fingertip-
sized to jellies the size of a dinner plate, all in one warm throbbing golden-brown mass in the
center of the water. The two swam easily on the surface with their long siamang arms, laughing and
calling to one another as the jellyfish in their millions caressed them with the most featherlike
of touches. The lake was the temperature of their own blood, and it was like a soupy bath, the
jellyfish so thick that Michelle felt she could almost walk on the surface. The warm touch wasn’t
erotic, exactly, but it was sensual in the way that an erotic touch was sensual, a light brush
over the skin by the pad of a teasing finger.

Trapped in a lake for thousands of years without suitable prey, the jellyfish had lost most of
their ability to sting. Only a small percentage of people were sensitive enough to the toxin to
receive a rash or feel a modest burning.

A very few people, though, were more sensitive than that.

Darton and Michelle left at dusk, and, by that time Darton was already gasping for breath. He said
he’d overexerted himself, that all he needed was to get back to their base for a snack, but as he
swung through the trees on the way up the ridge, he lost his hold on a Palauan apple tree and
crashed through a thicket of limbs to sprawl, amid a hail of fruit, on the sharp algae-covered
limestone of the ridge.

Michelle swung down from the trees, her heart pounding. Darton was nearly colorless and struggling
to breathe. They had no way of calling for help unless Michelle took their boat to Koror or to
their base camp on another island. She tried to help Darton walk, taking one of his long arms over
her shoulder, supporting him up the steep island trail. He collapsed, finally, at the foot of a
poison tree, and Michelle bent over him to shield him from the drops of venomous sap until he
died.

Her back aflame with the poison sap, she’d whispered her parting words into Darton’s ear. She
never knew if he heard.

The coroner said it was a million-to-one chance that Darton had been so deathly allergic, and
tried to comfort her with the thought that there was nothing she could have done. Torbiong, who
had made the arrangements for Darton and Michelle to come in the first place, had been consoling,
had offered to let Michelle stay with his family. Michelle had surprised him by asking permission
to move her base camp to another island, and to continue her work alone.

She also had herself transformed into a mermaid, and subsequently, a romantic local legend.

And now Darton was back, bobbing in a boat in the nearby channel and calling her name, shouting
into a bullhorn.

"Michelle, I love you." The words floated clear into the night air. Michelle’s mouth was dry. Her
fingers formed the sign <go away>.

There was a silence, and then Michelle heard the engine start on Darton’s boat. He motored past
her position, within five hundred meters or so, and continued on to the northern point of the
island.

<go away> . . .

"Michelle . . ." Again his voice floated out onto the breeze. It was clear that he didn’t know


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where she was. She was going to have to be careful about showing lights.

<go away> . . .

Michelle waited while Darton called out a half-dozen more times, and then he started his engine
and moved on. She wondered if he would search all three hundred islands in the Rock Island group.

No, she knew he was more organized than that.

She’d have to decide what to do when he finally found her.

While a thousand questions chased each other’s tails through his mind, Terzian opened the Nike bag
and withdrew the small hard plastic case inside, something like a box for fishing tackle. He
popped the locks on the case and opened the lid, and he saw glass vials resting in slots cut into
dark grey foam. In them was a liquid with a faint golden cast.

"The papiloma," Stephanie said.

Terzian dropped the lid on the case as he cast a guilty look over his shoulder, not wanting anyone
to see him with this stuff. If he were arrested under suspicion of being a drug dealer, the wads
of cash and the pistol certainly wouldn’t help.

"What do you do with the stuff once you get to where you’re going?"

"Brush it on the skin. With exposure to solar energy, it replicates as needed."

"Has it been tested?"

"On people? No. Works fine on rhesus monkeys, though."

He tapped his wedding ring on the arm of his seat. "Can it be . . . caught? I mean, it’s a virus,
can it go from one person to another?"

"Through skin-to-skin contact."

"I’d say that’s a yes. Can mothers pass it on to their children?"

"Adrian didn’t think it would cross the placental barrier, but he didn’t get a chance to test it.
If mothers want to infect their children, they’ll probably have to do it deliberately." She
shrugged. "Whatever the case, my guess is that mothers won’t mind green babies, as long as they’re
green healthy babies." She looked down at the little vials in their secure coffins of foam. "We
can infect tens of thousands of people with this amount," she said. "And we can make more very
easily."

If mothers want to infect their children . . . Terzian closed the lid of the plastic case and
snapped the locks. "You’re out of your mind," he said.

Stephanie cocked her head and peered at him, looking as if she’d anticipated his objections and
was humoring him. "How so?"

"Where do I start?" Terzian zipped up the bag, then tossed it in Stephanie’s lap, pleased to see
her defensive reflexes leap in response. "You’re planning on unleashing an untested transgenic
virus on Africa–on Africa of all places, a continent that doesn’t exactly have a happy history
with pandemics. And it’s a virus that’s cooked up by a bunch of illegal pharmacists in a non-
country with a murderous secret police, facts that don’t give me much confidence that this is
going to be anything but a disaster."

Stephanie tapped two fingers on her chin as if she were wishing there were a cigarette between
them. "I can put your mind to rest on the last issue. The animal study worked. Adrian had a family
of bright green rhesus in his lab, till the project was canceled and the rhesus were, ah,
liquidated."

"So if the project’s so terrific, why’d the company pull the plug?"



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"Money." Her lips twisted in anger. "Starving people can’t afford to pay for the treatments, so
they’d have to practically give the stuff away. Plus they’d get reams of endless bad publicity,
which is exactly what outlaw biotech companies in outlaw countries don’t want. There are millions
of people who go ballistic at the very thought of a genetically engineered vegetable–you can
imagine how people who can’t abide the idea of a transgenic bell pepper would freak at the thought
of infecting people with an engineered virus. The company decided it wasn’t worth the risk. They
closed the project down."

Stephanie looked at the bag in her hands. "But Adrian had been in the camps himself, you see. A
displaced person, a refugee from the civil war in Moldova. And he couldn’t stand the thought that
there was a way to end hunger sitting in his refrigerator in the lab, and that nothing was being
done with it. And so . . ." Her hands outlined the case inside the Nike bag. "He called me. He
took some vacation time and booked himself into the Henri IV, on the Place Dauphine. And I guess
he must have been careless, because . . ."

Tears starred in her eyes, and she fell silent. Terzian, strong in the knowledge that he’d shared
quite enough of her troubles by now, stared out the window, at the green landscape that was
beginning to take on the brilliant colors of Provence. The Hautes-Alpes floated blue and white-
capped in the distant East, and nearby were orchards of almonds and olives with shimmering leaves,
and hillsides covered with rows of orderly vines. The Rhone ran silver under the westering sun.

"I’m not going to be your bagman," he said. "I’m not going to contaminate the world with your
freaky biotech."

"Then they’ll catch you and you’ll die," Stephanie said. "And it will be for nothing."

"My experience of death," said Terzian, "is that it’s always for nothing."

She snorted then, angry. "My experience of death," she mocked, "is that it’s too often for profit.
I want to make mass murder an unprofitable venture. I want to crash the market in starvation by
giving away life." She gave another snort, amused this time. "It’s the ultimate anti-capitalist
gesture."

Terzian didn’t rise to that. Gestures, he thought, were just that. Gestures didn’t change the
fundamentals. If some jefe couldn’t starve his people to death, he’d just use bullets, or deadly
genetic technology he bought from outlaw Transnistrian corporations.

The landscape, all blazing green, raced past at over two hundred kilometers per hour. An attendant
came by and sold them each a cup of coffee and a sandwich.

"You should use my phone to call your wife," Stephanie said as she peeled the cellophane from her
sandwich. "Let her know that your travel plans have changed."

Apparently she’d noticed Terzian’s wedding ring.

"My wife is dead," Terzian said.

She looked at him in surprise. "I’m sorry," she said.

"Brain cancer," he said.

Though it was more complicated than that. Claire had first complained of back pain, and there had
been an operation, and the tumor removed from her spine. There had been a couple of weeks of mad
joy and relief, and then it had been revealed that the cancer had spread to the brain and that it
was inoperable. Chemotherapy had failed. She died six weeks after her first visit to the doctor.

"Do you have any other family?" Stephanie said.

"My parents are dead, too." Auto accident, aneurysm. He didn’t mention Claire’s uncle Geoff and
his partner Luis, who had died of HIV within eight months of each other and left Claire the
Victorian house on Esplanade in New Orleans. The house that, a few weeks ago, he had sold for six
hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and the furnishings for a further ninety-five thousand, and
Uncle Geoff’s collection of equestrian art for a further forty-one thousand.



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He was disinclined to mention that he had quite a lot of money, enough to float around Europe for
years.

Telling Stephanie that might only encourage her.

There was a long silence. Terzian broke it. "I’ve read spy novels," he said. "And I know that we
shouldn’t go to the place we’ve bought tickets for. We shouldn’t go anywhere near Nice."

She considered this, then said, "We’ll get off at Avignon."

They stayed in Provence for nearly two weeks, staying always in unrated hotels, those that didn’t
even rise to a single star from the Ministry of Tourism, or in gîtes ruraux, farmhouses with rooms
for rent. Stephanie spent much of her energy trying to call colleagues in Africa on her cell phone
and achieved only sporadic success, a frustration that left her in a near-permanent fury. It was
never clear just who she was trying to call, or how she thought they were going to get the
papiloma off her hands. Terzian wondered how many people were involved in this conspiracy of hers.

They attended some local fêtes, though it was always a struggle to convince Stephanie it was safe
to appear in a crowd. She made a point of disguising herself in big hats and shades and ended up
looking like a cartoon spy. Terzian tramped rural lanes or fields or village streets, lost some
pounds despite the splendid fresh local cuisine, and gained a suntan. He made a stab at writing
several papers on his laptop, and spent time researching them in internet cafés.

He kept thinking he would have enjoyed this trip, if only Claire had been with him.

"What is it you do, exactly?" Stephanie asked him once, as he wrote. "I know you teach at
university, but . . ."

"I don’t teach anymore," Terzian said. "I didn’t get my post-doc renewed. The department and I
didn’t exactly get along."

"Why not?"

Terzian turned away from the stale, stalled ideas on his display. "I’m too interdisciplinary.
There’s a place on the academic spectrum where history and politics and philosophy come
together–it’s called ‘political theory’ usually–but I throw in economics and a layman’s
understanding of science as well, and it confuses everybody but me. That’s why my MA is in
American Studies–nobody in my philosophy or political science department had the nerve to deal
with me, and nobody knows what American Studies actually are, so I was able to hide out there. And
my doctorate is in philosophy, but only because I found one rogue professor emeritus who was
willing to chair my committee.

"The problem is that if you’re hired by a philosophy department, you’re supposed to teach Plato or
Hume or whoever, and they don’t want you confusing everybody by adding Maynard Keynes and Leo
Szilard. And if you teach history, you’re supposed to confine yourself to acceptable stories about
the past and not toss in ideas about perceptual mechanics and Kant’s ideas of the noumenon, and of
course you court crucifixion from the laity if you mention Foucault or Nietzsche."

Amusement touched Stephanie’s lips. "So where do you find a job?"

"France?" he ventured, and they laughed. "In France, ‘thinker’ is a job description. It’s not
necessary to have a degree, it’s just something you do." He shrugged. "And if that fails, there’s
always Burger King."

She seemed amused. "Sounds like burgers are in your future."

"Oh, it’s not as bad as all that. If I can generate enough interesting, sexy, highly original
papers, I might attract attention and a job, in that order."

"And have you done that?"

Terzian looked at his display and sighed. "So far, no."



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Stephanie narrowed her eyes and she considered him. "You’re not a conventional person. You don’t
think inside the box, as they say."

"As they say," Terzian repeated.

"Then you should have no objections to radical solutions to world hunger. Particularly ones that
don’t cost a penny to white liberals throughout the world."

"Hah," Terzian said. "Who says I’m a liberal? I’m an economist."

So Stephanie told him terrible things about Africa. Another famine was brewing across the southern
part of the continent. Mozambique was plagued with flood and drought, a startling combination. The
Horn of Africa was worse. According to her friends, Santa Croce had a food shipment stuck in
Mogadishu and before letting it pass, the local warlord wanted to renegotiate his bribe. In the
meantime, people were starving, dying of malnutrition, infection, and dysentery in camps in the
dry highlands of Bale and Sidamo. Their own government in Addis Ababa was worse than the Somali
warlord, at this stage permitting no aid at all, bribes or no bribes.

And as for the southern Sudan, it didn’t bear thinking about.

"What’s your solution to this?" she demanded of Terzian. "Or do you have one?"

"Test this stuff, this papiloma," he said, "show me that it works, and I’m with you. But there are
too many plagues in Africa as it is."

"Confine the papiloma to labs while thousands die? Hand it to governments who can suppress it
because of pressure from religious loons and hysterical NGOs? You call that an answer?" And
Stephanie went back to working her phone while Terzian walked off in anger for another stalk down
country lanes.

Terzian walked toward an old ruined castle that shambled down the slope of a nearby hill. And if
Stephanie’s plant-people proved viable? he wondered. All bets were off. A world in which humans
could become plants was a world in which none of the old rules applied.

Stephanie had said she wanted to crash the market in starvation. But, Terzian thought, that also
meant crashing the market in food. If people with no money had all the food they needed, that
meant food itself had no value in the marketplace. Food would be so cheap that there would be no
profit in growing or selling it.

And this was all just one application of the technology. Terzian tried to keep up with science: he
knew about nanoassemblers. Green people was just the first magic bullet in a long volley of
scientific musketry that would change every fundamental rule by which humanity had operated since
they’d first stood upright. What happened when every basic commodity–food, clothing, shelter,
maybe even health–was so cheap that it was free? What then had value?

Even money wouldn’t have value then. Money only had value if it could be exchanged for something
of equivalent worth.

He paused in his walk and looked ahead at the ruined castle, the castle that had once provided
justice and security and government for the district, and he wondered if he was looking at the
future of all government. Providing an orderly framework in which commodities could be exchanged
was the basic function of the state, that and providing a secure currency. If people didn’t need
government to furnish that kind of security and if the currency was worthless, the whole future of
government itself was in question. Taxes weren’t worth the expense of collecting if the money
wasn’t any good, anyway, and without taxes, government couldn’t be paid for.

Terzian paused at the foot of the ruined castle and wondered if he saw the future of the civilized
world. Either the castle would be rebuilt by tyrants, or it would fall.

***

Michelle heard Darton’s bullhorn again the next evening, and she wondered why he was keeping fruit-
bat hours. Was it because his calls would travel farther at night?



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If he were sleeping in the morning, she thought, that would make it easier. She’d finished
analyzing some of her samples, but a principle of science was not to do these things alone: she’d
have to travel to Koror to mail her samples to other people, and now she knew to do it in the
morning, when Darton would be asleep.

The problem for Michelle was that she was a legend. When the lonely mermaid emerged from the sea
and walked to the post office in the little foam booties she wore when walking on pavement, she
was noticed. People pointed; children followed her on their boards, people in cars waved. She
wondered if she could trust them not to contact Darton as soon as they saw her.

She hoped that Darton wasn’t starting to get the islanders on his side.

Michelle and Darton had met on a field trip in Borneo, their obligatory government service after
graduation. The other field workers were older, paying their taxes or working on their second or
third or fourth or fifth careers, and Michelle knew on sight that Darton was no older than she,
that he, too, was a child among all these elders. They were pulled to each other as if drawn by
some violent natural force, cataloguing snails and terrapins by day and spending their nights
wrapped in each other in their own shell, their turtleback tent. The ancients with whom they
shared their days treated them with amused condescension, but then, that was how they treated
everything. Darton and Michelle didn’t care. In their youth they stood against all creation.

When the trip came to an end, they decided to continue their work together, just a hop across the
equator in Belau. Paying their taxes ahead of time. They celebrated by getting new bodies, an
exciting experience for Michelle, who had been built by strict parents who wouldn’t allow her to
have a new body until adulthood, no matter how many of her friends had been transforming from an
early age into one newly fashionable shape or another.

Michelle and Darton thought that anthropoid bodies would be suitable for the work, and so they
went to the clinic in Delhi and settled themselves on nanobeds and let the little machines turn
their bodies, their minds, their memories, their desires and their knowledge and their souls, into
long strings of numbers. All of which were fed into their new bodies when they were ready, and
reserved as backups to be downloaded as necessary.

Being a siamang was a glorious discovery. They soared through the treetops of their little island,
swinging overhand from limb to limb in a frenzy of glory. Michelle took a particular delight in
her body hair–she didn’t have as much as a real ape, but there was enough on her chest and back to
be interesting. They built nests of foliage in trees and lay tangled together, analyzing data or
making love or shaving their hair into interesting tribal patterns. Love was far from placid–it
was a flame, a fury. An obsession that, against all odds, had been fulfilled, only to build the
flame higher.

The fury still burned in Michelle. But now, after Darton’s death, it had a different quality, a
quality that had nothing to do with life or youth.

Michelle, spooning up blueberries and cream,                  riffled through the names and faces her spiders had
spat out. There were, now she added them up,                  a preposterous number of pictures of green-eyed women
with dark skin whose pictures were somewhere                  in the net. Nearly all of them had striking good
looks. Many of them were unidentified in the                  old scans, or identified only by a first name. The
highest probability the software offered was                  43 percent.

That 43 percent belonged to a Brazilian named Laura Flor, who research swiftly showed was home in
Aracaju during the critical period, among other things having a baby. A video of the delivery was
available, but Michelle didn’t watch it. The way women delivered babies back then was disgusting.

The next most likely female was another Brazilian seen in some tourist photographs taken in Rio.
Not even a name given. A further search based on this woman’s physiognomy turned up nothing, not
until Michelle broadened the search to a different gender, and discovered that the Brazilian was a
transvestite. That didn’t seem to be Terzian’s scene, so she left it alone.

The third was identified only as Stephanie, and posted on a site created by a woman who had done
relief work in Africa. Stephanie was shown with a group of other relief workers, posing in front
of a tin-roofed, cinderblock building identified as a hospital.


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The quality of the photograph wasn’t very good, but Michelle mapped the physiognomy anyway, and
sent it forth along with the name "Stephanie" to see what might happen.

There was a hit right away, a credit card charge to a Stephanie América Pais e Silva. She had
stayed in a hotel in Paris for the three nights before Terzian disappeared.

Michelle’s blood surged as the data flashed on her screens. She sent out more spiders and the good
news began rolling in.

Stephanie Pais was a dual citizen of Portugal and Angola, and had been educated partly in the
States–a quick check showed that her time at university didn’t overlap Terzian’s. From her
graduation, she had worked for a relief agency called Santa Croce.

Then a news item turned up, a sensational one. Stephanie Pais had been spectacularly murdered in
Venice on the night of July 19, six days before Terzian had delivered the first version of his
Cornucopia Theory.

Two murders. . . .

One in Paris, one in Venice. And one of them of the woman who seemed to be Terzian’s lover.

Michelle’s body shivered to a sudden gasping spasm, and she realized that in her suspense she’d
been holding her breath. Her head swam. When it cleared, she worked out what time it was in
Maryland, where Dr. Davout lived, and then told her deck to page him at once.

Davout was unavailable at first, and by the time he returned her call, she had more information
about Stephanie Pais. She blurted the story out to him while her fingers jabbed at the keyboard of
her deck, sending him copies of her corroborating data.

Davout’s startled eyes leaped from the data to Michelle and back. "How much of this . . ." he
began, then gave up. "How did she die?" he managed.

"The news article says stabbed. I’m looking for the police report."

"Is Terzian mentioned?"

<No> she signed. "The police report will have more details."

"Any idea what this is about? There’s no history of Terzian ever being connected with violence."

"By tomorrow," Michelle said, "I should be able to tell you. But I thought I should send this to
you because you might be able to tie this in with other elements of Terzian’s life that I don’t
know anything about."

Davout’s fingers formed a mudra that Michelle didn’t recognize–an old one, probably. He shook his
head. "I have no idea what’s happening here. The only thing I have to suggest is that this is some
kind of wild coincidence."

"I don’t believe in that kind of coincidence," Michelle said.

Davout smiled. "A good attitude for a researcher," he said. "But experience–well," he waved a
hand.

But he loved her, Michelle insisted inwardly. She knew that in her heart. She was the woman he
loved after Claire died, and then she was killed and Terzian went on to create the intellectual
framework on which the world was now built. He had spent his modest fortune building pilot
programs in Africa that demonstrated his vision was a practical one. The whole modern world was a
monument to Stephanie.

Everyone was young then, Michelle thought. Even the seventy-year-olds were young compared to the
people now. The world must have been ablaze with love and passion. But Davout didn’t understand
that because he was old and had forgotten all about love.



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"Michelle . . ." Darton’s voice came wafting over the waters.

Bastard. Michelle wasn’t about to let him spoil this.

Her fingers formed <gotta go>. "I’ll send you everything once it comes in," she said. "I think
we’ve got something amazing here."

She picked up her deck and swung it around so that she could be sure that the light from the
display couldn’t be seen from the ocean. Her bare back against the rough bark of the ironwood, she
began flashing through the data as it arrived.

She couldn’t find the police report. Michelle went in search of it and discovered that all police
records from that period in Venetian history had been wiped out in the Lightspeed War, leaving her
only with what had been reported in the media.

"Where are you? I love you!" Darton’s voice came from farther away. He’d narrowed his search, that
was clear, but he still wasn’t sure exactly where Michelle had built her nest.

Smiling, Michelle closed her deck and slipped it into its pouch. Her spiders would work for her
tirelessly till dawn while she dreamed on in her hammock and let Darton’s distant calls lull her
to sleep.

They shifted their lodgings every few days. Terzian always arranged for separate bedrooms. Once,
as they sat in the evening shade of a farm terrace and watched the setting sun shimmer on the
silver leaves of the olives, Terzian found himself looking at her as she sat in an old cane chair,
at the profile cutting sharp against the old limestone of the Vaucluse. The blustering wind
brought gusts of lavender from the neighboring farm, a scent that made Terzian want to inhale
until his lungs creaked against his ribs.

From a quirk of Stephanie’s lips, Terzian was suddenly aware that she knew he was looking at her.
He glanced away.

"You haven’t tried to sleep with me," she said.

"No," he agreed.

"But you look," she said. "And it’s clear you’re not a eunuch."

"We fight all the time," Terzian pointed out. "Sometimes we can’t stand to be in the same room."

Stephanie smiled. "That wouldn’t stop most of the men I’ve known. Or the women, either."

Terzian looked out over the olives, saw them shimmer in the breeze. "I’m still in love with my
wife," he said.

There was a moment of silence. "That’s well," she said.

And I’m angry at her, too, Terzian thought. Angry at Claire for deserting him. And he was furious
at the universe for killing her and for leaving him alive, and he was angry at God even though he
didn’t believe in God. The Trashcanians had been good for him, because he could let his rage and
his hatred settle there, on people who deserved it.

Those poor drunken bastards, he thought. Whatever they’d expected in that hotel corridor, it
hadn’t been a berserk grieving American who would just as soon have ripped out their throats with
his bare hands.

The question was, could he do that again? It had all occurred without his thinking about it, old
reflexes taking over, but he couldn’t count on that happening a second time. He’d been trying to
remember the Kenpo he’d once learned, particularly all the tricks against weapons. He found
himself miming combats on his long country hikes, and he wondered if he’d retained any of his
ability to take a punch.

He kept the gun with him, so the Trashcanians wouldn’t get it if they searched his room when he
was away. When he was alone, walking through the almond orchards or on a hillside fragrant with


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wild thyme, he practiced drawing it, snicking off the safety, and putting pressure on the trigger
. . . the first time the trigger pull would be hard, but the first shot would cock the pistol
automatically and after that the trigger pull would be light.

He wondered if he should buy more ammunition. But he didn’t know how to buy ammunition in France
and didn’t know if a foreigner could get into trouble that way.

"We’re both angry," Stephanie said. He looked at her again, her hand raised to her head to keep
the gusts from blowing her long ringlets in her face. "We’re angry at death. But love must make it
more complicated for you."

Her green eyes searched him. "It’s not death you’re in love with, is it? Because–"

Terzian blew up. She had no right to suggest that he was in a secret alliance with death just
because he didn’t want to turn a bunch of Africans green. It was their worst argument, and this
one ended with both of them stalking away through the fields and orchards while the scent of
lavender pursued them on the wind.

When Terzian returned to his room, he checked his caches of money, half-hoping that Stephanie had
stolen his Euros and run. She hadn’t.

He thought of going into her room while she was away, stealing the papiloma, and taking a train
north, handing it over to the Pasteur Institute or someplace. But he didn’t.

In the morning, during breakfast, Stephanie’s cell phone rang, and she answered. He watched while
her face turned from curiosity to apprehension to utter terror. Adrenaline sang in his blood as he
watched, and he leaned forward, feeling the familiar rage rise in him, just where he wanted it. In
haste, she turned off the phone, then looked at him. "That was one of them. He says he knows where
we are, and wants to make a deal."

"If they know where we are," Terzian found himself saying coolly, "why aren’t they here?"

"We’ve got to go," she insisted.

So they went. Clean out of France and into the Tuscan hills, with Stephanie’s cell phone left
behind in a trash can at the train station and a new phone purchased in Siena. The Tuscan
countryside was not unlike Provence, with vine-covered hillsides, orchards a-shimmer with the
silver-green of olive trees, and walled medieval towns perched on crags; but the slim, tall
cypress standing like sentries gave the hills a different profile, and there were different types
of wine grapes, and many of the vineyards rented rooms where people could stay and sample the
local hospitality. Terzian didn’t speak the language, and because Spanish was his first foreign
language, consistently pronounced words like "villa" and "panzanella" as if they were Spanish. But
Stephanie had grown up in Italy and spoke the language not only like a native, but like a native
Roman.

Florence was only a few hours away, and Terzian couldn’t resist visiting one of the great living
monuments to civilization. His parents had taken him to Europe several times as a child, but
somehow never made it here.

Terzian and Stephanie spent a day wandering the center of town, on occasion taking shelter from
one of the pelting rainstorms that shattered the day. At one point, with thunder booming overhead,
they found themselves in the Basilica di Santa Croce.

"Holy Cross," Terzian said, translating. "That’s your outfit."

"We have nothing to do with this church," Stephanie said. "We don’t even have a collection box
here."

"A pity," Terzian said as he looked at the soaked swarms of tourists packed in the aisles. "You’d
clean up."

Thunder accompanied the camera strobes that flashed against the huge tomb of Galileo like a vast
lighting storm. "Nice of them to forget about that Inquisition thing and bury him in a church,"



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Terzian said.

"I expect they just wanted to keep an eye on him."

It was the power of capital, Terzian knew, that had built this church, that had paid for the
stained glass and the Giotto frescoes and the tombs and cenotaphs to the great names of Florence:
Dante, Michelangelo, Bruni, Alberti, Marconi, Fermi, Rossini, and of course Machiavelli. This
structure, with its vaults and chapels and sarcophagi and chanting Franciscans, had been raised by
successful bankers, people to whom money was a real, tangible thing, and who had paid for the
centuries of labor to build the basilica with caskets of solid, weighty coined silver.

"So what do you think he would make of this?" Terzian asked, nodding at the resting place of
Machiavelli, now buried in the city from which he’d been exiled in his lifetime.

Stephanie scowled at the unusually plain sarcophagus with its Latin inscription. "No praise can be
high enough," she translated, then turned to him as tourist cameras flashed. "Sounds overrated."

"He was a republican, you know," Terzian said. "You don’t get that from just The Prince. He wanted
Florence to be a republic, defended by citizen soldiers. But when it fell into the hands of a
despot, he needed work, and he wrote the manual for despotism. But he looked at despotism a little
too clearly, and he didn’t get the job." Terzian turned to Stephanie. "He was the founder of
modern political theory, and that’s what I do. And he based his ideas on the belief that all human
beings, at all times, have the same passions." He turned his eyes deliberately to Stephanie’s
shoulder bag. "That may be about to end, right? You’re going to turn people into plants. That
should change the passions if anything would."

"Not plants," Stephanie hissed, and glanced left and right at the crowds. "And not here." She
began to move down the aisle, in the direction of Michelangelo’s ornate tomb, with its draped
figures who appeared not in mourning, but as if they were trying to puzzle out a difficult
engineering problem.

"What happens in your scheme," Terzian said, following, "is that the market in food crashes. But
that’s not the real problem. The real problem is, what happens to the market in labor?"

Tourist cameras flashed. Stephanie turned her head away from the array of Kodaks. She passed out
of the basilica and to the portico. The cloudburst had come to an end, but rainwater still
drizzled off the structure. They stepped out of the droplets and down the stairs into the piazza.

The piazza was walled on all sides by old palaces, most of which now held restaurants or shops on
the ground floor. To the left, one long palazzo was covered with canvas and scaffolding. The sound
of pneumatic hammers banged out over the piazza. Terzian waved a hand in the direction of the
clatter.

"Just imagine that food is nearly free," he said. "Suppose you and your children can get most of
your food from standing in the sunshine. My next question is, Why in hell would you take a filthy
job like standing on a scaffolding and sandblasting some old building?"

He stuck his hands in his pockets and began walking at Stephanie’s side along the piazza. "Down at
the bottom of the labor market, there are a lot of people whose labor goes almost entirely for the
necessities. Millions of them cross borders illegally in order to send enough money back home to
support their children."

"You think I don’t know that?"

"The only reason that there’s a market in illegal immigrants is that there are jobs that well-off
people won’t do. Dig ditches. Lay roads. Clean sewers. Restore old buildings. Build new buildings.
The well-off might serve in the military or police, because there’s a certain status involved and
an attractive uniform, but we won’t guard prisons, no matter how pretty the uniform is. That’s
strictly a job for the laboring classes, and if the laboring classes are too well-off to labor,
who guards the prisons?"

She rounded on him, her lips set in an angry line. "So I’m supposed to be afraid of people having
more choice in where they work?"


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"No," Terzian said, "you should be afraid of people having no choice at all. What happens when
markets collapse is intervention–and that’s state intervention, if the market’s critical enough,
and you can bet the labor market’s critical. And because the state depends on ditch-diggers and
prison guards and janitors and road-builders for its very being, then if these classes of people
are no longer available, and the very survival of civil society depends on their existence, in the
end, the state will just take them.

"You think our friends in Transnistria will have any qualms about rounding up people up at
gunpoint and forcing them to do labor? The powerful are going to want their palaces kept nice and
shiny. The liberal democracies will try volunteerism or lotteries or whatever, but you can bet
that we’re going to want our sewers to work, and somebody to carry our grandparents’ bedpans, and
the trucks to the supermarkets to run on time. And what I’m afraid of is that when things get
desperate, we’re not going to be any nicer about getting our way than those Sovietists of yours.
We’re going to make sure that the lower orders do their jobs, even if we have to kill half of them
to convince the other half that we mean business. And the technical term for that is slavery. And
if someone of African descent isn’t sensitive to that potential problem, then I am very
surprised!"

The fury in Stephanie’s eyes was visible even through her shades, and he could see the pulse
pounding in her throat. Then she said, "I’ll save the people, that’s what I’m good at. You save
the rest of the world, if you can." She began to turn away, then swung back to him. "And by the
way," she added, "fuck you!" turned, and marched away.

"Slavery or anarchy, Stephanie!" Terzian called, taking a step after. "That’s the choice you’re
forcing on people!"

He really felt he had the rhetorical momentum now, and he wanted to enlarge the point by saying
that he knew some people thought anarchy was a good thing, but no anarchist he’d ever met had ever
even seen a real anarchy, or been in one, whereas Stephanie had–drop your anarchist out of a
helicopter into the eastern Congo, say, with all his theories and with whatever he could carry on
his back, and see how well he prospered. . . .

But Terzian never got to say any of these things, because Stephanie was gone, receding into the
vanishing point of a busy street, the shoulder bag swinging back and forth across her butt like a
pendulum powered by the force of her convictions.

Terzian thought that perhaps he’d never see her again, that he’d finally provoked her into
abandoning him and continuing on her quest alone, but when he stepped off the bus in Montespèrtoli
that night, he saw her across the street, shouting into her cell phone.

A day later, as with frozen civility they drank their morning coffee, she said that she was going
to Rome the next day. "They might be looking for me there," she said, "because my parents live
there. But I won’t go near the family, I’ll meet Odile at the airport and give her the papiloma."

Odile? Terzian thought. "I should go along," he said.

"What are you going to do?" she said, "carry that gun into an airport?"

"I don’t have to take the gun. I’ll leave it in the hotel room in Rome."

She considered. "Very well."

Again, that night, Terzian found the tumbled castle in Provence haunting his thoughts, that ruined
relic of a bygone order, and once more considered stealing the papiloma and running. And again, he
didn’t.

They didn’t get any farther than Florence, because Stephanie’s cell phone rang as they waited in
the train station. Odile was in Venice. "Venezia?" Stephanie shrieked in anger. She clenched her
fists. There had been a cache of weapons found at the Fiumicino airport in Rome, and all planes
had been diverted, Odile’s to Marco Polo outside Venice. Frenzied booking agents had somehow found
rooms for her despite the height of the tourist season.



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Fiumicino hadn’t been re-opened, and Odile didn’t know how she was going to get to Rome. "Don’t
try!" Stephanie shouted. "I’ll come to you."

This meant changing their tickets to Rome for tickets to Venice. Despite Stephanie’s excellent
Italian, the ticket seller clearly wished the crazy tourists would make up their mind which
monuments of civilization they really wanted to see.

Strange–Terzian had actually planned to go to Venice in five days or so. He was scheduled to
deliver a paper at the Conference of Classical and Modern Thought.

Maybe, if this whole thing was over by then, he’d read the paper after all. It wasn’t a prospect
he coveted: he would just be developing another footnote to a footnote.

The hills of Tuscany soon began to pour across the landscape like a green flood. The train slowed
at one point–there was work going on on the tracks, men with bronze arms and hard hats–and Terzian
wondered how, in the Plant People Future, in the land of Cockaigne, the tracks would ever get
fixed, particularly in this heat. He supposed there were people who were meant by nature to fix
tracks, who would repair tracks as an avocation or out of boredom regardless of whether they got
paid for their time or not, but he suspected that there wouldn’t be many of them.

You could build machines, he supposed, robots or something. But they had their own problems,
they’d cause pollution and absorb resources and, on top of everything, they’d break down and have
to be repaired. And who would do that?

If you can’t employ the carrot, Terzian thought, if you can’t reward people for doing necessary
labor, then you have to use the stick. You march people out of the cities at gunpoint, like Pol
Pot, because there’s work that needs to be done.

He tapped his wedding ring on the arm of his chair and wondered what jobs would still have value.
Education, he supposed; he’d made a good choice there. Some sorts of administration were
necessary. There were people who were natural artists or bureaucrats or salesmen and who would do
that job whether they were paid or not.

A woman came by with a cart and sold Terzian some coffee and a nutty snack product that he wasn’t
quite able to identify. And then he thought, labor.

"Labor," he said. In a world in which all basic commodities were provided, the thing that had most
value was actual labor. Not the stuff that labor bought, but the work itself.

"Okay," he said, "it’s labor that’s rare and valuable, because people don’t have to do it anymore.
The currency has to be based on some kind of labor exchange–you purchase x hours with y dollars.
Labor is the thing you use to pay taxes."

Stephanie gave Terzian a suspicious look. "What’s the difference between that and slavery?"

"Have you been reading Nozick?" Terzian scolded. "The difference is the same as the difference
between paying taxes and being a slave. All the time you don’t spend paying your taxes is your
own." He barked a laugh. "I’m resurrecting Labor Value Theory!" he said. "Adam Smith and Karl Marx
are dancing a jig on their tombstones! In Plant People Land, the value is the labor itself ! The
calories!" He laughed again, and almost spilled coffee down his chest.

"You budget the whole thing in calories! The government promises to pay you a dollar’s worth of
calories in exchange for their currency! In order to keep the roads and the sewer lines going, a
citizen owes the government a certain number of calories per year–he can either pay in person or
hire someone else to do the job. And jobs can be budgeted in calories-per-hour, so that if you do
hard physical labor, you owe fewer hours than someone with a desk job–that should keep the young,
fit, impatient people doing the nasty jobs, so that they have more free time for their other
pursuits." He chortled. "Oh, the intellectuals are going to just hate this! They’re used to
valuing their brain power over manual labor–I’m going to reverse their whole scale of values!"

Stephanie made a pffing sound. "The people I care about have no money to pay taxes at all."

"They have bodies. They can still be enslaved." Terzian got out his laptop. "Let me put my ideas


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together."

Terzian’s frenetic two-fingered typing went on for the rest of the journey, all the way across the
causeway that led into Venice. Stephanie gazed out the window at the lagoon soaring by, the
soaring water birds, and the dirt and stink of industry. She kept the Nike bag in her lap until
the train pulled into the Stazione Ferrovia della Stato Santa Lucia at the end of its long
journey.

Odile’s hotel was in Cannaregio, which, according to the map purchased in the station gift shop,
was the district of the city nearest the station and away from most of the tourist sites. A brisk
wind almost tore the map from their fingers as they left the station, and their vaporetto bucked a
steep chop on the greygreen Grand Canal as it took them to the Ca’ d’ Oro, the fanciful white High
Gothic palazzo that loomed like a frantic wedding cake above a swarm of bobbing gondolas and
motorboats.

Stephanie puffed cigarettes, at first with ferocity, then with satisfaction. Once they got away
from the Grand Canal and into Cannaregio itself, they quickly became lost. The twisted medieval
streets were broken on occasion by still, silent canals, but the canals didn’t seem to lead
anywhere in particular. Cooking smells demonstrated that it was dinnertime, and there were few
people about, and no tourists. Terzian’s stomach rumbled. Sometimes the streets deteriorated into
mere passages. Stephanie and Terzian were in such a passage, holding their map open against the
wind and shouting directions at each other, when someone slugged Terzian from behind.

He went down on one knee with his head ringing and the taste of blood in his mouth, and then two
people rather unexpectedly picked him up again, only to slam him against the passage wall. Through
some miracle, he managed not to hit his head on the brickwork and knock himself out. He could
smell garlic on the breath of one of the attackers. Air went out of him as he felt an elbow to his
ribs.

It was the scream from Stephanie that concentrated his attention. There was violent motion in
front of him, and he saw the Nike swoosh, and remembered that he was dealing with killers, and
that he had a gun.

In an instant, Terzian had his rage back. He felt his lungs fill with the fury that spread through
his body like a river of scalding blood. He planted his feet and twisted abruptly to his left,
letting the strength come up his legs from the earth itself, and the man attached to his right arm
gave a grunt of surprise and swung counterclockwise. Terzian twisted the other way, which budged
the other man only a little, but which freed his right arm to claw into his right pants pocket.

And from this point on it was just the movement that he had rehearsed. Draw, thumb the safety,
pull the trigger hard. He shot the man on his right and hit him in the groin. For a brief second,
Terzian saw his pinched face, the face that reflected such pain that it folded in on itself, and
he remembered Adrian falling in the Place Dauphine with just that look. Then he stuck the pistol
in the ribs of the man on his left and fired twice. The arms that grappled him relaxed and fell
away.

There were two more men grappling with Stephanie. That made four altogether, and Terzian reasoned
dully that after the first three fucked up in Paris, the home office had sent a supervisor. One
was trying to tug the Nike bag away, and Terzian lunged toward him and fired at a range of two
meters, too close to miss, and the man dropped to the ground with a whuff of pain.

The last man had hold of Stephanie and swung her around, keeping her between himself and the
pistol. Terzian could see the knife in his hand and recognized it as one he’d seen before. Her
dark glasses were cockeyed on her face and Terzian caught a flash of her angry green eyes. He
pointed the pistol at the knife man’s face. He didn’t dare shoot.

"Police!" he shrieked into the wind. "Policia!" He used the Spanish word. Bloody spittle spattered
the cobblestones as he screamed.

In the Trashcanian’s eyes, he saw fear, bafflement, rage.

"Polizia!" He got the pronunciation right this time. He saw the rage in Stephanie’s eyes, the fury
that mirrored his own, and he saw her struggle against the man who held her.


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"No!" he called. Too late. The knife man had too many decisions to make all at once, and Terzian
figured he wasn’t very bright to begin with. Kill the hostages was probably something he’d been
taught on his first day at Goon School.

As Stephanie fell, Terzian fired, and kept firing as the man ran away. The killer broke out of the
passageway into a little square, and then just fell down.

The slide of the automatic locked back as Terzian ran out of ammunition, and then he staggered
forward to where Stephanie was bleeding to death on the cobbles.

Her throat had been cut and she couldn’t speak. She gripped his arm as if she could drive her
urgent message through the skin, with her nails. In her eyes, he saw frustrated rage, the rage he
knew well, until at length he saw there nothing at all, a nothing he knew better than any other
thing in the world.

He shouldered the Nike bag and staggered out of the passageway into the tiny Venetian square with
its covered well. He took a street at random, and there was Odile’s hotel. Of course: the
Trashcanians had been staking it out.

It wasn’t much of a hotel, and the scent of spice and garlic in the lobby suggested that the desk
clerk was eating his dinner. Terzian went up the stair to Odile’s room and knocked on the door.
When she opened–she was a plump girl with big hips and a suntan–he tossed the Nike bag on the bed.

"You need to get back to Mogadishu right away," he said. "Stephanie just died for that."

Her eyes widened. Terzian stepped to the wash basin to clean the blood off as best he could. It
was all he could do not to shriek with grief and anger.

"You take care of the starving," he said finally, "and I’ll save the rest of the world."

Michelle rose from the sea near Torbiong’s boat, having done thirty-six hundred calories’ worth of
research and caught a honeycomb grouper into the bargain. She traded the fish for the supplies he
brought. "Any more blueberries?" she asked.

"Not this time." He peered down at her, narrowing his eyes against the bright shimmer of sun on
the water. "That young man of yours is being quite a nuisance. He’s keeping the turtles awake and
scaring the fish."

The mermaid tucked away her wings and arranged herself in her rope sling. "Why don’t you throw him
off the island?"

"My authority doesn’t run that far." He scratched his jaw. "He’s interviewing people. Adding up
all the places you’ve been seen. He’ll find you pretty soon, I think."

"Not if I don’t want to be found. He can yell all he likes, but I don’t have to answer."

"Well, maybe." Torbiong shook his head. "Thanks for the fish."

Michelle did some preliminary work with her new samples, and then abandoned them for anything new
that her search spiders had discovered. She had a feeling she was on the verge of something
colossal.

She carried her deck to her overhanging limb and let her legs dangle over the water while she
looked through the new data. While paging through the new information, she ate something called a
Raspberry Dynamo Bar that Torbiong had thrown in with her supplies. The old man must have included
it as a joke: it was over-sweet and sticky with marshmallow and strangely flavored. She chucked it
in the water and hoped it wouldn’t poison any fish.

Stephanie Pais had been killed in what the news reports called a "street fight" among a group of
foreign visitors. Since the authorities couldn’t connect the foreigners to Pais, they had to
assume she was an innocent bystander caught up in the violence. The papers didn’t mention Terzian
at all.



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Michelle looked through pages of followup. The gun that had shot the four men had never been
found, though nearby canals were dragged. Two of the foreigners had survived the fight, though one
died eight weeks later from complications of an operation. The survivor maintained his innocence
and claimed that a complete stranger had opened fire on him and his friends, but the judges hadn’t
believed him and sent him to prison. He lived a great many years and died in the Lightspeed War,
along with most people caught in prisons during that deadly time.

One of the four men was Belorussian. Another Ukrainian. Another two Moldovan. All had served in
the Soviet military in the past, in the Fourteenth Army in Transnistria. It frustrated Stephanie
that she couldn’t shout back in time to tell the Italians to connect these four to the murder of
another ex-Soviet, seven weeks earlier, in Paris.

What the hell had Pais and Terzian been up to? Why were all these people with Transnistrian
connections killing each other, and Pais?

Maybe it was Pais they’d been after all along. Her records at Santa Croce were missing, which was
odd, because other personnel records from the time had survived. Perhaps someone was arranging
that certain things not be known.

She tried a search on Santa Croce itself, and slogged through descriptions and mentions of a whole
lot of Italian churches, including the famous one in Florence where Terzian and Pais had been seen
at Machiavelli’s tomb. She refined the search to the Santa Croce relief organization, and found
immediately the fact that let it all fall into place.

Santa Croce had maintained a refugee camp in Moldova during the civil war following the
establishment of Transnistria. Michelle was willing to bet that Stephanie Pais had served in that
camp. She wondered if any of the other players had been residents there.

She looked at the list of other camps that Santa Croce had maintained in that period, which seemed
to have been a busy one for them. One name struck her as familiar, and she had to think for a
moment before she remembered why she knew it. It was at a Santa Croce camp in the Sidamo province
of Ethiopia where the Green Leopard Plague had first broken out, the first transgenic epidemic.

It had been the first real attempt to modify the human body at the cellular level, to help
marginal populations synthesize their own food, and it had been primitive compared to the more
successful mods that came later. The ideal design for the efficient use of chlorophyll was a leaf,
not the homo sapien–the designer would have been better advised to create a plague that made its
victims leafy, and later designers, aiming for the same effect, did exactly that. And Green
Leopard’s designer had forgotten that the epidermis already contains a solar-activated enzyme:
melanin. The result on the African subjects was green skin mottled with dark splotches, like the
black spots on an implausibly verdant leopard.

The Green Leopard Plague broke out in the Sidamo camp, then at other camps in the Horn of Africa.
Then it leaped clean across the continent to Mozambique, where it first appeared at a Oxfam camp
in the flood zone, spread rapidly across the continent, then leaped across oceans. It had been a
generation before anyone found a way to disable it, and by then other transgenic modifiers had
been released into the population, and there was no going back.

The world had entered Terzian’s future, the one he had proclaimed at the Conference of Classical
and Modern Thought.

What, Michelle thought excitedly, if Terzian had known about Green Leopard ahead of time? His
Cornucopia Theory had seemed prescient precisely because Green Leopard appeared just a few weeks
after he’d delivered his paper. But if those Eastern bloc thugs had been involved somehow in the
plague’s transmission, or were attempting to prevent Pais and Terzian from sneaking the modified
virus to the camps. . . .

Yes! Michelle thought exultantly. That had to be it. No one had ever worked out where Green
Leopard originated, but there had always been suspicion directed toward several semi-covert labs
in the former Soviet empire. This was it. The only question was how Terzian, that American in
Paris, had got involved. . . .

It had to be Stephanie, she thought. Stephanie, who Terzian had loved and who had loved him, and


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who had involved him in the desperate attempt to aid refugee populations.

For a moment, Michelle bathed in the beauty of the idea. Stephanie, dedicated and in love, had
been murdered for her beliefs–realdeath!–and Terzian, broken-hearted, had carried on and brought
the future–Michelle’s present–into being. A wonderful story! And no one had known it till now, no
one had understood Stephanie’s sacrifice, or Terzian’s grief . . . not until the lonely mermaid,
working in isolation on her rock, had puzzled it out.

"Hello, Michelle," Darton said.

Michelle gave a cry of frustration and glared in fury down at her lover. He was in a yellow
plastic kayak–kayaking was popular here, particularly in the Rock Islands–and had slipped his
electric-powered boat along the margin of the island, moving in near-silence. He looked grimly up
at her from below the pitcher plant that dangled below the overhang.

They had rebuilt him, of course, after his death. All the data was available in backup, in Delhi
where he’d been taken apart, recorded, and rebuilt as an ape. He was back in a conventional male
body, with the broad shoulders and white smile and short hairy bandy legs she remembered.

Michelle knew that he hadn’t made any backups during their time in Belau. He had his memories up
to the point where he’d lain down on the nanobed in Delhi. That had been the moment when his love
of Michelle had been burning its hottest, when he had just made the commitment to live with
Michelle as an ape in the Rock Islands.

That burning love had been consuming him in the weeks since his resurrection, and Michelle was
glad of it, had been rejoicing in every desperate, unanswered message that Darton sent sizzling
through the ether.

"Damn it," Michelle said, "I’m working."

<Talk to me> Darton’s fingers formed. Michelle’s fingers made a ruder reply.

"I don’t understand," Darton said. "We were in love. We were going to be together."

"I’m not talking to you," Michelle said. She tried to concentrate on her video display.

"We were still together when the accident happened," Darton said. "I don’t understand why we can’t
be together now."

"I’m not listening, either," said Michelle.

"I’m not leaving, Michelle!" Darton screamed. "I’m not leaving till you talk to me!"

White cockatoos shrieked in answer. Michelle quietly picked up her deck, rose to her feet, and
headed inland. The voice that followed her was amplified, and she realized that Darton had brought
his bullhorn.

"You can’t get away, Michelle! You’ve got to tell me what happened!"

I’ll tell you about Lisa Lee, she thought, so you can send her desperate messages, too.

Michelle had been deliriously happy for her first month in Belau, living in arboreal nests with
Darton and spending the warm days describing their island’s unique biology. It was their first
vacation, in Prague, that had torn Michelle’s happiness apart. It was there that they’d met Lisa
Lee Baxter, the American tourist who thought apes were cute, and who wondered what these shaggy
kids were doing so far from an arboreal habitat.

It wasn’t long before Michelle realized that Lisa Lee was at least two hundred years old, and that
behind her diamond-blue eyes was the withered, mummified soul that had drifted into Prague from
some waterless desert of the spirit, a soul that required for its continued existence the blood
and vitality of the young. Despite her age and presumed experience, Lisa Lee’s ploys seemed to
Michelle to be so obvious, so blatant. Darton fell for them all.

It was only because Lisa Lee had finally tired of him that Darton returned to Belau, chastened and


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solemn and desperate to be in love with Michelle again. But by then it was Michelle who was tired.
And who had access to Darton’s medical records from the downloads in Delhi.

"You can’t get away, Michelle!"

Well, maybe not. Michelle paused with one hand on the banyan’s trunk. She closed her deck’s
display and stashed it in a mesh bag with some of her other stuff, then walked out again on the
overhanging limb.

"I’m not going to talk to you like this," she said. "And you can’t get onto the island from that
side, the overhang’s too acute."

"Fine," Darton said. The shouting had made him hoarse. "Come down here, then."

She rocked forward and dived off the limb. The salt water world exploded in her senses. She
extended her wings and fluttered close to Darton’s kayak, rose, and shook sea water from her eyes.

"There’s a tunnel," she said. "It starts at about two meters and exits into the lake. You can swim
it easily if you hold your breath."

"All right," he said. "Where is it?"

"Give me your anchor."

She took his anchor, floated to the bottom, and set it where it wouldn’t damage the live coral.

She remembered the needle she’d taken to Jellyfish Lake, the needle she’d loaded with the mango
extract to which Darton was violently allergic. Once in the midst of the jellyfish swarm, it had
been easy to jab the needle into Darton’s calf, then let it drop to the anoxic depths of the lake.

He probably thought she’d given him a playful pinch.

Michelle had exulted in Darton’s death, the pallor, the labored breathing, the desperate pleading
in the eyes.

It wasn’t murder, after all, just a fourth-degree felony. They’d build a new Darton in a matter of
days. What was the value of a human life, when it could be infinitely duplicated, and cheaply? As
far as Michelle was concerned, Darton had amusement value only.

The rebuilt Darton still loved her, and Michelle enjoyed that as well, enjoyed the fact that she
caused him anguish, that he would pay for ages for his betrayal of her love.

Linda Lee Baxter could take a few lessons from the mermaid, Michelle thought.

Michelle surfaced near the tunnel and raised a hand with the fingers set at <follow me>. Darton
rolled off the kayak, still in his clothes, and splashed clumsily toward her.

"Are you sure about this?" he asked.

"Oh yes," Michelle replied. "You go first, I’ll follow and pull you out if you get in trouble."

He loved her, of course. That was why he panted a few times for breath, filled his lungs, and
dove.

Michelle had not, of course, bothered to mention that the tunnel was fifteen meters long, quite
far to go on a single breath. She followed him, very interested in how this would turn out, and
when Darton got into trouble in one of the narrow places and tried to back out, she grabbed his
shoes and held him right where he was.

He fought hard but none of his kicks struck her. She would remember the look in his wide eyes for
a long time, the thunderstruck disbelief in the instant before his breath exploded from his lungs
and he died.

She wished that she could speak again the parting words she’d whispered into Darton’s ear when he



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lay dying on the ridge above Jellyfish Lake. "I’ve just killed you. And I’m going to do it again."

But even if she could have spoken the words underwater, they would have been untrue. Michelle
supposed this was the last time she could kill him. Twice was dangerous, but a third time would be
too clear a pattern. She could end up in jail, though, of course, you only did severe prison time
for realdeath.

She supposed that she would have to discover his body at some point, but if she cast the kayak
adrift, it wouldn’t have to be for a while. And then she’d be thunderstruck and grief-stricken
that he’d thrown away his life on this desperate attempt to pursue her after she’d turned her back
on him and gone inland, away from the sound of his voice.

Michelle looked forward to playing that part.

She pulled up the kayak’s anchor and let it coast away on the six-knot tide, then folded away her
wings and returned to her nest in the banyan tree. She let the breeze dry her skin and got her
deck from its bag and contemplated the data about Terzian and Stephanie Pais and the outbreak of
the Green Leopard Plague.

Stephanie had died for what she believed in, killed by the agents of an obscure, murderous regime.
It had been Terzian who had shot those four men in her defense, that was clear to her now. And
Terzian, who lived a long time and then died in the Lightspeed War along with a few billion other
people, had loved Stephanie and kept her secret till his death, a secret shared with the others
who loved Stephanie and who had spread the plague among the refugee populations of the world.

It was realdeath that people suffered then, the death that couldn’t be corrected. Michelle knew
that she understood that kind of death only as an intellectual abstract, not as something she
would ever have to face or live with. To lose someone permanently . . . that was something she
couldn’t grasp. Even the ancients, who faced realdeath every day, hadn’t been able to accept it,
that’s why they’d invented the myth of Heaven.

Michelle thought about Stephanie’s death, the death that must have broken Terzian’s heart, and she
contemplated the secret Terzian had kept all those years, and she decided that she was not
inclined to reveal it.

Oh, she’d give Davout the facts, that was what he paid her for. She’d tell him what she could find
out about Stephanie and the Transnistrians. But she wouldn’t mention the camps that Santa Croce
had built across the starvation-scarred world, she wouldn’t point him at Sidamo and Green Leopard.
If he drew those conclusions himself, then obviously the secret was destined to be revealed. But
she suspected he wouldn’t–he was too old to connect those dots, not when obscure ex-Soviet
entities and relief camps in the Horn of Africa were so far out of his reference.

Michelle would respect Terzian’s love, and Stephanie’s secret. She had some secrets of her own,
after all.

The lonely mermaid finished her work for the day and sat on her overhanging limb to gaze down at
the sea, and she wondered how long it would be before Darton called her again, and how she would
torture him when he did.

–With thanks to Dr. Stephen C. Lee




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