“Couple of blocks straight is a posh hotel,” she hinted. “Us crapulous wobblers need a cozy bed.”

  Rigone’s advice to dump this vixen at the nearest spaceport was sounding more and more like an excellent suggestion—but her grip on his wrist was a tourniquet, partly to support her tipsy balance, partly because she was very afraid. Nevertheless she was unnaturally happy. What drug was she on? He wasn’t sure she would make it to the next corridor, much less the next hotel.

  Worse, he was lost. Not knowing where you were in the Olibanum was not smart. He had abandoned his map device at the Teaser’s, thinking he was immediately going to be able to tap into his fam’s navigational aids. Nothing about his new fam worked. Whatever obscure streamer of the galaxy it came from, its operating system was unlike anything he had ever encountered—and his organic mind was extremely well trained in fam operating systems. All he could get from it was a frantic buzz.

  “Petunia, we’ve been staggering along the Olibanum until I don’t recognize it anymore. Do you know where we are?”

  “I’m just a goggle-eyed following-girl. I forgot to ask; was that man hawking an animal zoo or a human zoo? I’ve never seen an elephant. And did you gawk that shaft we passed? Never look down a shaft when you’re all zink-zanged!”

  “Stop. We need a plan.”

  “I have a plan, big man. I follow you to the nearest hotel, you lead. Tomorrow is another day. Rigone said you’d take me to the local spaceport. We could get a cabin together. Do you kit-bag the credit for first class? Rigone said you were a very generous trick.” Her eyes narrowed thinking about that. “We can’t just stand here. Thinking sets my stomach up for puke again.”

  He was still dizzy and it was getting worse. The desperation didn’t help. He wasn’t going to make it to the nearest hotel. “We find a cafe. Then we sit down and drink juice until we are both sober.”

  She turned unsteadily to take a careful look at his face. “Big man, your new fam’s squawking?” People streamed around them a little quickly to avoid proximity to her gluttonous snakes. “I’ve been figuring on you. You’re a criminal. Your fam was zanged. You cop a gray appliance from Rigone and now you have to go to ground only on some other planet far, far away. Hey, I’ll go with you for the punch—got no ties.” She nudged him with her hips. She grinned.

  Eron was no longer listening to Petunia’s babble. Slowly he moved over to the wall, hanging on—to keep from fainting. Nothing made sense. He saw the colors. Pedestrians had fingernails. He was aware of the hand gripping his wrist. His zenoli training in mind balance was useless without a fam to . . .

  “Confused man,” Petunia said kindly, “I’ll eye for you.” She started to drag him. “Fam’s killing you.” She pushed. “Get along, big man. We get that monkey off your back quick.” He sank to the walk. “Hey, comrade. None of that. We don’t need the bleeding corridor police. Up, up.” She pulled him to his feet, fiercely, never having let go of his wrist. He followed her to a rent-by-the-hour hotel. “Not the dream hotel I had zoomed on. Don’t even have time to ask if they double-distill their piss.” She paused, white-faced, woeful. “Crumbling place has no grav-chute!” She pushed him up the stairs.

  Petunia eased Eron through the dilator, manhandling him because he was so much bigger than a tiny girl. She maneuvered him to face the bed, then shoved and watched him fall. Very gently, almost reverently, she disconnected his fam and took care to find a place for it. He shuddered with convulsive relief. She poured a cup of water and slipped one of her knockout pills into it, cradling him in her arms against her plastic breasts while she fed him the potent drink. She laid him down again, too weak to pull the covers aside and tuck him in, then queasily snuggled beside him, arms around him. For a while she had forgotten how smashed she was. “If I barb, wake me up,” she whispered into his ear— but he was unconscious.

  Eron opened his eyes. It was good to feel sane again. He gazed straight up, not really ready yet to find Petunia. One could always tell the cheapness of a hotel by the height of the ceiling. If she was still asleep, he was going to be a coward, take his fam, and sneak away on tiptoes. When he dared look . . . a shock.

  Petunia was nude at the desk, using a small instrument on his fam. He jumped out of bed like a shot. “Sons of a sun! What the . . .” He stopped in midstride—the fam on her back was the same make as his. And where in space had she put his clothes?

  “Hi. Just tuning your fam to cure that buzz. I filched one of Rigone’s instruments when he wasn’t looking. Ha, the old tattooed prick! Pillage has priority over being sick. It’s amazing what you can stuff in a fake bosom that no one dares look at!” She brought over his fam. “Try it on now. The buzz is gone. My hangover isn’t.”

  “Your fam is just like mine,” he announced suspiciously, glancing about the tiny room for his garments and spotting only the shoes.

  “I know the model. I hail from a pov planet where jerk-class can’t afford fams. Mommy lifted one out of a hot shipment passing through and made me a gift. Gave me a boost. So I ran away and set out across the galaxy for adventure.”

  “You’re lying,” said Eron sternly, hiding his genitals with a pillow. “I can predict backward to the truth. At least as far as thirteen years.”

  To that insult she took umbrage. “Every ass-faced citizen of Splendid Wisdom thinks he’s a psychohistorian who can predict backwards and forwards with the greatest of ease, tra-la-la. I don’t think you can predict me from straw.”

  Eron continued to gaze at her reproachfully.

  She met his stare, vacillating between defiance and capitulation. “So I’m lying. Mommy was rich. I stole her jewelry and set out across the galaxy for adventure. Is that a better lie?”

  “Get some clothes on and we’ll discuss it.”

  “Try your fam first. I want to see if I shot the buzz. And no sass from you. My mommy is a whiz quantum-state-electronics crafter, and I have all her routines in my fam, and mine’s the best fam made in the galaxy, and I space damn well know how well I do because I’ve been doing it since I was three.”

  Meekly he put on the fam and activated it. The buzz was gone but he still didn’t have access to its basic functions. He watched Petunia slip into the manufacturum closet for a new outfit that had been in production. Such a lovely body, he thought. Suddenly he knew he wasn’t going to dump her. She was only a kid. She needed help. Come to think of it he actually felt extremely loyal to her. If he only had some clothes himself.

  Petunia stepped out of the manufacturum wearing a modest electrospun all-weather chastity, something for the spaceways. “Ghaaa. It itches. I forgot the underwear. Do you like it?” She pirouetted.

  He found her attractive. “Attractive,” he said.

  “Am I adorable, too?”

  “Of course!”

  “Tell me more,” she insisted.

  Eron was observing his feelings with a reluctant amazement. “I find you a delightfully entertaining young woman,” he ground out through his teeth.

  “Girl,” she said. “Don’t patronize me! How much do you admire me?”

  There was a rational answer to that—but the words forming in his mind were very different. “My admiration would follow you to Star’s End,” he said impulsively, against all attempts to restrain his tongue. He was beginning to wonder where his conversation was coming from. Had he inherited his fam from a lady-killer whose twaddle was somehow leaking through?

  “Yeech! And will you love me till the End of Stars?”

  Eron grinned. “We have to stop this nonsense,” he said, alarmed at the depth of his feelings.

  “Oh, no. Not yet. Tell me if you are sincere or just impressed by my outfit. Are you my slave?”

  He was her slave. Astonishing. When had that transformation happened? It had happened between the time he had activated his fam and the time she had emerged from the manufacturum, that’s when it had happened. He paled. As unobtrusively as possible, he tried to deactivate the fam—and couldn’t.

  His delinquent child was watching his every twitch with a fathomless amusement. “Hey, you’ve caught on.”

  He had not expected to be attacked by the tuned probe driving his own familiar. All his life he had been taught many clever ways of using a fam to counter the emotional control of a Cloun-type tuned probe—the fam in its original form had been designed as protection against Cloun the Stubborn’s early device. What was he to do now? He couldn’t very well strangle someone he loved.

  She stood in a defiant pose, almost ready to run, unsure that she really had control. “Hit me,” she demanded.

  “No,” he said gently, though that was exactly what he wanted to do. Now she was triumphant. “They say it’s a fool who thinks he can take a girl of the Olibanum to a hotel room without getting rolled.” Then with vituperation, “Thought you could abandon me, did you?”

  Her anger triggered his anger. “I’m a poor tool right now, of little use to you or anyone else. I don’t even have access to the basic functions of my fam.”

  She shrugged. “I can teach you. Couple hours. Do you know any zing places on this spaceforsaken planet? We can amuse ourselves while we work. But no drinking! I might take a few snorts but you have to stay sober! You’re my protector. I feel absolutely safe with you.” She took his arm, “Let’s go, lover boy.”

  “My clothes?” he said pitiably.

  “Your new duds are hanging in the manufacturum. Something more my style than the rags you were wearing.”

  While he dressed in an outrageously loud pompfrock he continued their conversation. “As a matter of politeness, you might inform me of the rules I am working under. Then I won’t run up against them and get ‘zanged’ while I’m attempting to do something normal like flaying you alive.”

  “You’re not allowed to hurt me and you have to come to my defense when I’m being threatened. You have to obey my orders, no matter how frivolous, but you’re allowed to disagree with me if you think my orders will harm me. After taking care of me, you’re allowed to take care of yourself. Those were the rules my mother invented for my father. Pretty good, huh?”

  “I can tell they were invented by a woman!” grumbled Eron the slave.

  Since she wanted to be a goggle-eyed tourist in the middle of his life’s worst crisis he suggested that Petunia take them to the Valley of Galactic Seas. The uninterruptible guide attachment of his antique map device had recommended the site profusely. She agreed. “Yea, sharks!” she said flapping her hands like fins.

  The multistoried corridor was one vast aquarium. Stairs led up and through the tanks past fish and bottom-walking monsters and down and around the tanks of starfish, seaweed vines, sleek carnivores, school fish, eels, stalkers. There were vast malls to view the tanks from a distance and small parks in which to sit surrounded by the sea life of the galaxy.

  In a bright park facing an underwater jungle of vines and flowering seaweed that harbored brilliantly painted sea darters and the occasional slumbering shelled monster, she taught him how to control his fam; it used a finger-manipulation code read from the motor centers of the brain.

  To get any results at all Eron had to play like a musician diddling on an invisible flute, but Petunia told him that the fam would soon learn to sensitize itself to read the thought expressing a particular fingering while his fingers were quiescent, or involved in other tasks. The fam’s learning mode seemed to operate with pleasing rapidity—or was that the skill of his tutor?

  It took him only hours to establish the linkages so that the fam could paint pictures in his brain, create sounds, kinesthetics, feelings. It was already contrived to do those things but only in interaction with the organic Scogil Eron’s brain needed to train the fam’s circuits to a different code.

  They were climbing stairs that ran beside the cross section of a mountain stream teeming with the life that lived in melting snow when he asked her a question he had been pondering. “Did Rigone set you up as my tutor?”

  “Have you lashed your noodle? I was there to abscond with his property. Even Rigone doesn’t know the value of your fam. Imagine how much a fam with a built-in slaver is worth on the black market! I drunk myself silly getting into position—and when he flew for a minute, I couldn’t even crawl up off the floor! You blew in while I was decorating the disposoria and walked away with my prize. I couldn’t believe it when he cold-showered me and set you up as my trick. You lose some, you win some, as my beloved daddy used to say.”

  “You’re a thief? Who do you work for?”

  “Myself. I do lots of things for a living, even go to school.”

  For the rest of the afternoon Eron was delighted with the results of his twitches—aside from the strange stares evoked by mad midair fingering. To alleviate his embarrassment he bought, from an antique dealer under the sharks, the template for an over-shoulder photozither (complete with dead earphones)—an instrument played by plucking laser beams. While he “played” no one noticed the lack of lasers or the lack of sound.

  He began to feel human again. He had revived his ability to do long division in his head; he could locate himself in Splendid Wisdom’s labyrinth, search and filter the local advertisements, monitor the maxwell spectrum, integrate and graph in n-dimensions, and actually recall long lists after placing them in storage, even remember people’s names. The math functions of his fam sent him into deliriums of joy. Now if he were ever to locate a copy of his dissertation! Idly he checked to see that he still had the comm card given to him by the strange Frightfulperson with the russet-gold-flaked eyes who was a fan of his math. The possibilities took on a new urgency.

  Because Petunia was in a quixotic mood they spent the evening sleeping inside the substructure of a huge plastic whale which had a broken entrance used for electrical maintenance. He took the time out to consider his plight. He really didn’t mind doing whatever sparked this girl’s fancy—but he knew his lack of rebellion was an illusion and a deadly one. Somehow he had to enlist Petunia in his cause so that it would be her cause, too. He had to discover why his mathematics had provoked such an extreme reaction in Jars Hanis.

  At her first stirrings in the morning, he began his attack. “Petunia?”

  “Ho hum. You’re still awake? You’ve been very restless all night, big man. Can’t sleep on concrete? Sissy.”

  “The police will be after me. That’s serious. If I just wander around in aquariums and zoos, something bad will catch up with me—and you.”

  “Not wandering around,” she snarked, “you practiced accessing your fam. I conduct under-the-sky seminars cause I come from a planet where we have a sky. Lighten up. When desperate, have some fun.”

  “What are your goals?” he asked. “We probably have goals in common.”

  “Oh, shut up! Do you think I’m catching hook on that line? My goals are yours right now. I’m smarter than you are. I’ve had my fam for thirteen years and you’re only a baby who’s been twiddling with yours a couple hours!”

  After such a command there was very little he was allowed to say. He tried and nothing came forth. It was frightening. “Permission to speak?” asked Eron dutifully.

  “Go ahead. Make it short.”

  “I’m suspecting that you know who once owned my fam.” A previous slave who had managed to escape? And a con-artist astrologer.

  “You bet. I’m searching for him.”

  “A young man with the name Hiranimus Scogil?” Eron couldn’t see her expression in the dark but he heard her startle. “Petunia. He’s dead.”

  “No he’s not! How do you know?”

  “Rigone told me.”

  He heard the sobs. “I . . . wanted to get . . . his fam back to him,” she wailed. Eron tried to comfort her but she shoved him away. “Get away from me. Get away!”

  “Your friend?”

  “Yeah. My friend. My dad.” She lapsed into a silence punctuated only by the occasional resonant sob. He shared her silence because he had much to think about. He was the slave of a ghoul’s daughter. Finally she spoke again, tersely. “Let’s go.”

  They crawled out when no one was looking, pretended to admire the great plastic whale, and began to stroll until they found a seafood restaurant. Even with all the fresh fish abounding in the neighborhood, Eron noted wryly, the fish they ate would be manufactured. It was cheaper to build a fish out of sewage than to grow one—and the template could leave out heads and bones and tail. The manufacturing process was just good enough to get the taste right, but not good enough to build a live fish.

  “We eat on my credit,” she said stonily. “I have an account they can’t trace. Eron Osa has to disappear. And don’t sober-face. It’s my dad, not yours.”

  My ghoul, he thought.

  Over delicious fillets made from Splendid sewage, Petunia recounted the rest of the story. “Mommy hated me flying with him on his sorties—he took me everywhere, nobody suspects a nice man with a child—so she rigged his fam’s driving probe with some Cloun side-rea-soners to enforce his care of me. That was before I knew electronics. Mommy is such a paranoid. If you fancy me a hot-shot fam modifier, I’m not that good. To hit you, I just calibrated what was already there. Dad never knew he was my slave cause he already loved me. Not like you,” she said resentfully.

  “The fish you are feeding me is delicious, and it is a lovely morning to do nothing—but we still need a plan,” he countered.

  “You win. Saving Dad is out. We switch plans.” But they were still her plans and she wasn’t bothering to consult Eron. After an hour’s thought, the remnants of the meal gone, their napkins twisted, she confessed that she was stumped. “I don’t know what to do next.” She snuggled against Eron in the booth, not the slightest bit afraid of her slave.

  “Are you asking for my input?” he asked hopefully.