Okasan stepped in beside the driver who was dressed in black. Another mime? Tristan wondered.

  "Good luck," she said, then turned to the driver. "Up, Charl."

  The floater rose, defying gravity. Then, picking up speed like a motorbike, it quickly lifted to the roof, and then out.

  Mung stood beside Tristan, watching.

  "Filamentous! Doubt they'll see her."

  The door to the building split and the guards ran in.

  But Mung and Tristan were alone...and Mung began discussing loudly how they'd use the empty building in their business.

  Just before the guards got to them, Mung leaned over and whispered, "Listen, if you’re ever in serious trouble here in the freezone—very serious trouble—go to the Bascombe district and ask around for ‘Proteus.’”

  “Proteus?”

  “But only as a last resort.”

  “But who’s Proteus?”

  “Better you don’t know until you have to. But now we'll chat up the guards a bit, then I'll get you back to Smalley's. You've got a lot to do, brother..."

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The mime's here," said the voice in Streig's ear.

  "Where?"

  "Just came through the front."

  "Where has he been?"

  "Not sure, sir. We, uh, lost him for a while."

  "Lost him?" Streig did not like that. He wanted to know every move that mime made. "How did that happen?"

  "Not sure, sir. He dropped out of sight among the warehouses."

  "Did he now?"

  Streig withheld his anger. He spoke softly, evenly, knowing it would be more unsettling to this mutagen than an outburst.

  "Y-yes, sir. But we're locked on him now."

  "See that you stay locked on. And make sure everyone's in place."

  *

  Smalley's Smart Bar—a circus, a carnival of human oddities.

  At times Tristan almost felt as if he might be the true human and they the freaks. He stood on the main floor while people bellied up to the bustling Smart Bar to sip or snort concoctions that delivered jolts to specific areas of the neural geography.

  Want to feel warm and forgiving toward the rest of the planet and tell everyone about it, whether they want to hear or not? Try a shot of Blue Dusk, the late-generation affective/emotive accentuator, with a Rap chaser.

  And for those who want their kicks more direct and to the point—say, a burst of false inspiration with the supercilious afterglow of bogus understanding?—then Eureka was your whiff of choice.

  But Tristan knew the psychoactive beverages were only part of the Smalley's experience. Many came for the ambiance, the noise, the chaotic life-swirl that went on and on—unless you crashed and Smalley's goons had to drag you out screaming, turning your Blue Dusk calm into a hellish morning-after.

  Tristan looked around the main floor while the music thumped in his brainstem. The demimondaines—mostly splicers or nanoformed types with designer bods, stood in small groups, almost dancing but mostly hanging onto each other, letting the drugs do their work.. Reptile accessories were the new rage, and Tristan saw forked tongues slipping from many a lipless mouth.

  He heard laughter to his left and turned. Three reptilians were standing around a fourth, tossing snacks into the air and watching her snag them in midflight with her slim, pink, half-meter tongue.

  Then frog-tongue and her companions started to twitch as designer adrenal rushes of Hhhelll kicked in. The gloms forbade Hhhelll in their territories—too unpredictable. If nothing else, the gloms liked predictability. But this was the freezone, and this was Smalley's.

  Some nanoforming had practical applications. The bouncer who was passing him had a regulation right arm, but his left was a four-foot tentacle. Tristan had been impressed many times at how quickly a Hhhelll crazy could be calmed when a fleshy rope around the neck cut off all air.

  Tristan had seen this sideshow before, and always he had the same thought: Here I am struggling to join humanity...while they struggle to leave it behind.

  Someone bumped into him, and when Tristan turned he saw a female...or what he took to be a female. Except the "she" in this case sported a furry tail.

  "Oh, so sorry," the woman said. Her glassy eyes confirmed that she was only marginally present in the room.

  "It's okay."

  But the female—how sure of that could he be, when all body parts were open to manipulation?—didn't move on. She sidled close to Tristan, and her tail slowly curled from the rear to the front.

  "How about something warm blooded? I bet you like...little kitties."

  Tristan kept scanning the packed room. He was on the main floor, and but he knew of many side rooms: the Reals, the giant communal Holotank, as well as private party rooms where the word ‘party’ could mean almost anything..

  Finding his contact shouldn't be—

  Wait—could this sexy splicer be it? He doubted it.

  The woman's tail had completely encircled Tristan, the tip brushing his cheek. He felt himself responding—lots of testosterone in this masque.

  Maybe I should simply tell her I'm a mime, he thought. If she’s the contact, good. If she’s not, it’ll scare her off. Or maybe not. Considering that tail, she probably wouldn't mind.

  And no doubt the crowd held more than a few anti-mime crazies. Rumor had it that people on Hhhelll got a lot of pleasure ripping mimes apart.

  Better try another tack.

  He smiled at the woman and brushed the tail away.

  "Sorry. I'm supposed to meet someone here."

  She made a small moue of displeasure. "Male...female...or other?"

  “Don’t know yet. We’ve never met.”

  “Interesting. Introduce me when you do. I’m very fond of threesomes.”

  Tristan grinned and moved away.

  Not her.

  A small circle of people had gathered over by a table; their rhythmic clapping filled the air. Tristan drifted over and saw a six-foot tall lizard. The crowd cheered. And then, in a flash, the lizard was replaced by someone Tristan knew...someone from the old vids and movies: A platinum blonde in a white dress, pouting at the crowd, her lips full.

  "Marilyn Monroe," Tristan said to himself.

  "What?" said the guy next to him, physically present, wavering back and forth on his feet as if he were on a ship, but his mind adrift somewhere off Ganymede.

  Tristan has seen her old vids. He had been moved by this woman, her girlish laugh, her fullness, something special that radiated from inside her.

  "That's Marilyn Monroe."

  "Dat's nice," the man said, staring open mouthed at the actress.

  Then Marilyn disappeared, much too fast, and a man stood there, short skinny, ugly.

  Showing off his holosuit.

  He touched his sleeve and suddenly he was a nude male, all bulging muscles and flashing teeth.

  Don't you wish, Tristan thought.

  He'd heard something in the Ocean about a young man keeling over at his wedding. Turned out he was wearing a holosuit and was close to a hundred-and-fifty years old. Past the help of the bio re-engineering teams, he’d opted to look like someone a lot younger. His intended hadn't a clue until he died.

  Surprise, surprise…

  Tristan moved away.

  Nobody is who they are anymore, Tristan thought. So why can't mimes be accepted?

  He knew the answer: We're different from conception. We have the Goleman chromosome, which means we've never been truly human.

  He looked around and checked the time...he should have made contact by now. The mission would come to a quick end—and his hope for selfhood would disappear—if he didn't find the contact with the code key.

  Must be in another room, he thought.

  He wandered into the large area toward the rear, the room for the Reals, those afraid of becoming wetheads, afraid of spending all their lives afloat in the Ocean drifting from one mind-blowing virtual experience to another.

  Pleasure and excitement weren’t the only things people caught in the Ocean. The craving for obscure sensations tended to grow. The Ocean contained entire islands devoted to strange varieties of experience, some thrilling, pleasurable, terrifying—others that were unclassifiable.

  But Smalley's had a corrective.

  This dark room offered real experiences, real pleasure, real pain, real hurt...

  One big attraction was NOK, a simple strategy game using real figures on a floating dodecahedron. Five NOK tables sat near the front, all bathed in pale blue light that barely showed the faces of each game's pair of combatants.

  Tristan knew how to play, but he lacked the instinct or the strategic sense to play well. Maybe some sense of gameplay was missing because he was a mime.

  The game was easy enough: moving pieces, capturing areas of the floating solid, capturing other pieces. The nasty twist in NOK was that each player was directly wired to the board.

  And each loss of a solid's face, or worse, each loss of a piece, brought a rushing jolt to the brain—a nasty snap of electricity, carefully monitored by Smalley’s game managers. Sometimes they overdid it. Tristan had witnessed convulsions at NOK games. And he'd heard of a cardiac arrest or two.

  A dark, quiet room, its silence shattered by the real screams of real people losing.

  Tristan drifted close to a table where a good sized crowd had gathered. They watched a gray-haired man, sleek, with a shining forehead glowing in the blue light as he considered his next move.

  He was playing a disheveled younger man, someone who looked like a wethead. How'd they reel him in from the Ocean? Tristan wondered. What bait had lured him to dry land? Some wetheads stayed chipped in so long they forgot about food and all bodily functions. They washed up dead…drowned.

  Not a big problem, according to the gloms.

  The gray-haired man, obviously a NOK master, made a move. Though noise filtered in from the outer spaces, the NOK room was still, the games intense.

  The younger man scratched his scalp, sniffed, shook his head. Tristan scanned the board, wondering what he'd do next.

  The kid reached up to the floating board, hesitated, then pulled back a piece, retreating. The gray-aired man grinned and made a counter move as if pouncing.

  But too quickly the man's fingers left his piece. Now the kid coughed, a vicious hack that turned into laughing.

  He's got him, Tristan thought. The kid had set a trap, and the man had walked into it.

  Now the kid reached up and moved.

  The man lost a piece, and immediately he was jolted, his scream piercing the darkness. The crowd backed away, as if they too might get zapped.

  And when the gray-haired man stopped shaking, he stood up, out of the NOK chair.

  "Leaving?" the wethead said, grinning..."so soon?"

  The man didn't stop to say anything.

  The kid turned and looked around at the crowd.

  "Anyone else want a piece of me?"

  No takers.

  He turned to Tristan. "Hey, how about you, big guy."

  Tristan felt someone behind him, pressing against him. He turned and saw the woman with a tail hugging close.

  "Go ahead," she whispered. "Bet you could beat him."

  "I doubt that. Doubt it very much."

  But the kid was still watching him.

  Where the hell is my contact? he wondered.

  He had to get out of here, get to the Flagge Glom—

  "Come on, you look like a risk taker."

  Tristan shook his head. "Find someone else.."

  He expected the NOK player to move on, to look for another victim. But then the kid's eyes narrowed.

  "I'm like a cat, stranger. And I've got my eye on you..."

  Tristan took a breath. Like a cat...I've got my eye. This scraggly-looking wethead, this biochip addict was the contact who had the codekey.

  So why doesn't he get up, go into a private room, and give me the muting—?

  "Take a seat, sailor."

  What was this, some kind of joke? Or was this ruse necessary, so no Flagge spies saw what was going on?

  "I'm not a good NOK player," Tristan said.

  The kid grinned. "Oh, don't worry. You will be when I'm done with you."

  Tristan could feel the zaps of electricity already. He slipped into the facing seat.

  "That's the spirit. Let the game, and the lesson, begin. You're about to learn NOK strategy from a master."

  The crowd closed around the table. The air became thick with sweat and smoke and the sweet smell of the dozens of bizarre psychoactive offerings of Smalley's.

  "A quick game," Tristan said, noting that his throat was dry.

  The kid extended his hand. "They call me Padre...in this Zone anyway. And the only kind of games I play are quick ones." He pulled his hand away. "Your move."

  Why do I have to play? Tristan wondered. Why can't he just give me the damn codekey?

  The kid across the table glanced at the crowd gathered around. "We got a lot of people watching us, eh?"

  Was that a message? Was this place watched...would it be too hard to slip him the key here?

  "As I said, I'm not a very good player."

  Padre laughed. "No pain, no game, big guy. You get first move."

  Tristan looked at the board suspended before them. Either one of them could press a button in the console chair to rotate the 12-sided solid. The slender NOK pieces were held in place by a sensitive electromagnet.

  What's a good opening? he thought. A game of NOK could be lost in minutes, it was that fast. And the first move was crucial.

  He took one of his center pieces and slid it close to an edge to support another near a hostile space.

  Padre grinned. He made his move quickly, aggressively pushing a piece onto one of the spaces on a free side.

  Quiet in the room. The crowd interested in the game? Perhaps. More likely wanting to see who'd get the first jolt.

  Tristan made another cautious move, which Padre followed by bringing a second piece forward to a different free side. It didn't look so bad...but when Tristan made a third move, Padre let out a whoop and captured one of Tristan's pieces. The magnetic charge holding it in place vanished and the piece fell to the table.

  A brief, intense jolt of electricity shot through the chair and Tristan yelped.

  "Nasty one, eh? Hope you've got a high tolerance."

  Tristan made another move, the possibility of getting zapped always in the back of his mind. And again Padre responded boldly, this time capturing a free side...a victory that sent another jolt to Tristan.

  He stared at Padre. Maybe I have this wrong, he thought. Maybe this NOK guru isn't the contact, maybe he's just—

  But as if reading Tristan's thoughts, Padre looked up and moved one of his pieces onto a space...

  A space where he was vulnerable to an attack.

  And suddenly Tristan knew what was happening.

  He’s sacrificing that piece...because that’s the codekey?

  Tristan advanced cautiously. Padre's next move was on a side directly opposite the vulnerable piece. Tristan waited, then made the solid rotate. He captured Padre's piece, and it clattered to the table.

  Padre yelped as the jolt hit him. "Mute. Didn't see that." He raised a finger to Tristan. "That move was...key."

  Tristan smiled, as in...I get it. I know.

  He picked up the fallen piece and covered it with his hand. It felt like any other NOK piece.

  Padre smiled. "Now, let's get serious."

  And the kid meant it. They were going to finish the game, with many more painful blasts to come. But not for Padre.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Tristan stood just inside Smalley’s exit.

  He had finally escaped the NOK table, leaving Padre seeking another victim, showing no sign that anything had happened.

  The NOK piece was in Tristan's pocket. He looked at the exit, at the door scanners that checked for weapons, and at the beefy black-visored security guards watching everyone who came and went.

  He took a breath and walked past the scanners, under the glare of the security guards. But no alarm sounded. He was outside.

  Keep walking, he told himself—in case there's a delay.

  And why didn't the scanners—whose company slogan was "We Can See What You Had For Breakfast"—pick up the stolen game piece?

  Good question...unless Smalley was in on the transfer, paid off by Kaze Glom to let this little illegal transfer go down.

  Or maybe they simply weren't programmed to look for NOK pieces. He

  used his sleeve to wipe the sweat off his face and his neck—and felt something.

  There—just below the neck line, the tiniest thing stuck to his skin. He started to pick at it, his arm twisted awkwardly behind him. Finally he came away with a thumbnail-sized patch of flesh-colored plastic.

  A dose patch!

  Tristan stared at it, feeling sweat break out anew all over his body. Where had that come from? What had he been dosed with? And by whom? Had to have been that cat woman—she was the only one who'd touched him, coiling that tail around his neck.

  But with what? Some sort of aphrodisiac? Or a psychoactive? He felt no ill effects—no effects of any sort.

  Maybe the drug hadn't seeped through his skin, or didn't affect him.

  He'd have to keep watch for any symptoms. Meanwhile, he had to get moving and look for a spot to activate the key.

  He hurried down a street and passed the bazaar, quiet now...most of the better stuff well picked over. He watched a disheveled-looking man setting up his items, pulling them from an old sack. His treasures..

  Tristan stopped.

  "What's that?" he said to the man.

  The man looked up, alarmed, maybe scared.

  The man had something in his hand, something that Tristan had seen before. He really should go, he really shouldn't waste time looking, but—

  The man was nervous. Tristan remembered that his masque was big, imposing...maybe even threatening.

  "Wh-what do you want?"

  Tristan came closer. "That thing in your hands. What is it?"

  The old man's nervous, beady eyes darted from his sack of treasures to Tristan.