He examined the gathering around the campfire with renewed professional interest. Among these unlikely candidates (and several others not present at this evening's festivities) who was his likeliest contact?

  Lieutenant Colonel Juan Sebastiano was young to be commander—Empleado was annoyed at the untidiness of referring to a colonel as "captain"—of the McCain, or of anything else important. Empleado had always rated him as politically unreliable. He had a careless mouth with regard to authority and was personally loyal to Gutierrez. Empleado cherished plans for dealing with him when time and opportunity presented themselves. Of course the same apparent qualities might make perfect cover. Still, Empleado had a feeling for these things. He couldn't see Sebastiano as any sort of KGB agent.

  Major Jesus Ortiz was a different matter. It was said that the new commander of the Hatch had ancestors, not all that remote, who thought it hilarious to skin the soles of a victim's feet and let him walk home across a broiling desert floor. He remembered reading that even the Apaches and Comanches were afraid of the Yaquis. Of course the rumor might be untrue. Empleado's personnel files, condensed for spaceflight, didn't go back that far, and Ortiz may not have inherited his forebears' sense of humor. That sort of sanguine ruthlessness wasn't the best test of an agent, anyway. He himself had a rather tender stomach when it came to the brute mechanics of interrogation, a failing he tried to make up for in other ways. Nevertheless, it wouldn't surprise him if his contact turned out to be Ortiz.

  With the equivalent rank of major, there was his own subordinate, Roger Betal. The man was becoming a problem, his usefulness destroyed by a beating at the hands of this interloper Eichra Oren, and what had happened to his fellow enforcers Roo and Hake. Empleado had relied not only on Betal's martial arts, but his ability as a deceptively charming talker. Surprisingly, that ability was always less effective with female subjects than expected. Now he seemed to be avoiding Empleado, seeking the company of expeditionaries friendly with the so-called Elders and their pet human. Such a problem was best dealt with sooner rather than later—unless the whole thing was a brilliant ruse and Betal was the one who'd left the note in his bunk.

  Empleado shook his head. This game he'd begun playing with himself was useless. The next person he considered was Rosalind Nguyen. As a physician, she was an ideal intelligence gatherer. And so were women, especially small, pretty ones. She saw crew members in their weakest moments and most vulnerable states of mind. Carrying the rank of captain lent her a measure of nonintimidating authority, while her ethnic origin and the political background it implied might lead them to believe she'd be sympathetic with their discontents, since she was ideologically suspect simply by being what she was.

  He'd never say that the government of the ASSR was racially motivated—not within hearing of his superiors and at the same time hope to continue occupying a position within that government himself. It was wise to avoid the habit of even thinking it too frequently. But one look at personnel distribution, at the disproportionate number of Hispanics and Blacks and their relative ranks within the Aerospace Force, would convince anyone that it was more fashionable these days to lay claim to certain ancestors, or to possess certain surnames, than others.

  Someone passed a guitar to First Lieutenant Lee Marna, life-support technician for the McCain. She let her fingers ripple across the nylon strings, singing of "the strangest dream I never had before."

  There was an alarming number of amateur musicians with this expedition. If it were within his power he'd have forbidden it. A guitar was worse than a loaded gun. Homemade music, like homemade humor, was inherently subversive, especially made by an attractive young woman whose cornsilk hair and fair complexion—opposing the officially encouraged physiognomy he'd been thinking about earlier—drew attention to the performance. In the interest of state security, entertainment must be left to carefully winnowed specialists. He'd always argued that the greatest danger to authority was laughter (or any unsanctioned happiness, for that matter) which the state had not provided as a reward for approved behavior and was not therefore in a position, as a punishment, to deny.

  Empleado wasn't the only one watching the little blonde. Second Lieutenant Danny Gutierrez—now there was a thought: what if the general's son were the undercover agent? Young Gutierrez was a petty criminal, a smuggler and small dealer in forbidden goods. That would certainly provide him with credentials valuable to a covert agent of the KGB. What else did he know about the boy? He was Gutierrez's second son, the eldest having been killed in some particularly horrible manner during a recent unpublicized conflict in South Africa. Danny was a friend of Sebastiano's, to all appearances more the colonel's protégé than his father's. That placed him in position to keep an eye on Sebastiano, provided anyone in power felt the colonel was important enough to merit it. Or it might just represent precaution on the general's part. Like racism, nepotism wasn't unknown within the ASSR, but blatancy was a far greater failing.

  Whatever his real status, it was obvious the boy might soon have another problem on his hands—and only on his hands, if he was lucky. He hadn't yet noticed the longing glances being cast his way by Demene Wise, making a first appearance in public since Eichra Oren had crippled one of his knees, possibly for life.

  Before the mishap, Wise had been another of Empleado's informal "staff," with the equivalent rank of Master Sergeant. Empleado, preserving the tatters of the man's cover, hadn't visited him in the improvised sickbay and didn't know whether he'd show an inclination, like Betal, to avoid his superior. With that great cube of a head and his enormous shoulders, he still looked as if he'd been carved from basalt, but his sagging face had aged twenty years. The man had never seemed particularly bright, but in Empleado's present frame of mind, he considered sexual deviation as a KGB cover without rejecting it altogether. Wise's presence in the gathering was being tolerated, possibly for the doctor's sake. Aside from body language that belied his Herculean appearance, and his effeminate mooning over the general's son, he seemed to be enjoying the music as much as anyone.

  As Marna played, firelight picked out the dark, bearded features of Staff Sergeant C. C. Jones, former TV star, now eyes and ears for American Truth and, rumor had it, an enemy of Horatio Gutierrez. Empleado wished he knew more about that. He always wished he knew more about everything. As usual, Jones was trying to steal the scene, lending conspicuous approval to whatever everyone else demonstrated they were enjoying, in this case, the pretty lieutenant's singing.

  Of many types for which he had nothing but contempt, journalists held top position on Empleado's list, even above politicians. Anyone, from left to right, who'd ever been personally connected with an event that became news knew that they were incapable of getting the simplest story straight. Pre-Soviet American journalism had always gloried in its self-appointed role as watchdog over the rights of the individual. The truth was that during its long, self-congratulatory history, it had been more like a cur caught bloody-muzzled time after time, savaging the very flocks it had been trusted to protect.

  No one knew better than the KGB that there is no such thing as "the news." Jones, his colleagues, and his predecessors peddled gossip, mostly in the form of horrible things happening to faraway strangers, things that might have happened to you and still might, unless . . . More ignorant than the nine-year-old minds they pitched to, dirtier than the ward heelers they supposedly kept an eye on, they were nothing more than merchants of fear, parasites feeding on calamities that bred more fear, and an ever more powerful state, a state that grew by promising to keep everybody safe from everything. Since the universe is an inherently unsafe place, it was a profitable symbiosis. The media might single out this incompetent bureaucrat or that corrupt politician, they might favor those whose paranoia dwelt on domestic dangers rather than foreign, but they never questioned the paranoia itself, or the wisdom of erecting a security state to assuage it. Over three centuries, they had never once taken the individual's side against the growth of government power.

  Of course Empleado approved of the security state, and recognized the importance of journalists in creating and maintaining it. That didn't make associating with them turn his stomach any less.

  Reflected firelight from Pulaski's glasses caught his eye, distracting him. The idea that this gangly, bespectacled female—what was the old-fashioned word?—nerd might be a high-ranking undercover operative for the KGB was so ridiculous he refused to consider it.

  For similar reasons, he rejected machinist Corporal Roger Owen. Empleado's father, Salvador, had been a machinist, dragging himself home with blackened nails, reeking of overheated solvents, slouching in a dilapidated armchair swilling rationed cervesas while Arturo's mamacita fried the evening tortillas and beans, watching propaganda on TV as if it meant something. How he'd longed to get out of that house—however well it reflected the proletarian ideal—out of that self-consciously blue-collar life, to do something that would leave his hands clean after a day's work, to get a glimpse of what lay behind the propaganda, to make something important of himself.

  It wasn't that he hadn't loved them in his way. Father, like son, was an ardent if naive Marxist, loyal to his union and the socialism it buttressed almost as solidly as journalism did. But Empleado distrusted all men who worked with their hands. They were too bound up in the concretes of life, unable to detach themselves from petty facts. They insisted that philosophy and politics make sense—dollars and cents—unable to see that nobody interested in accruing power had anything to gain by limiting himself to the mundane. Besides, he thought, if Owen had written that note, it would have been in soft pencil, with greasy thumbprints around the edges.

  As Marna finished her song, Rubber Chicken Alvarez, last and by any measure least of the group around the fire, became the life of the party, impersonating Jerry Lewis, telling jokes he laughed at loudest himself. In other circumstances he'd have been wearing a lampshade on his head. Empleado was confident these would-be Robinson Crusoes would be weaving him one next week, of bean sprouts or whatever the corporal was cooking in his cast-iron pot. If he'd had to stake his life on it, Empleado believed he'd bet on Carlos the Clown, preparer of food, disposer of garbage, maker of practical jokes, as his spy. He fit his role as village idiot too perfectly. He played the fool too well.

  dam oooo: wound my heart with monotonous langour

  It could only mean "the dam at midnight." Glancing at his watch, he slipped from the camp, headed for his rendezvous. It didn't take him long to get there. "Dam" was an ambitious term for the barrier of meteoric stone (carbonaceous chondrite, comprising most of the asteroid, was too crumbly) piled across the stream where it came nearest the camp. The idea was to raise the level to obtain running water. Sebastiano, who'd taken charge of the project, still hadn't any idea what he was going to use for pipes—plastic provided by the Elders, or the hollow trunks of bamboolike plants.

  The site had been chosen for more than proximity. Here also the stream passed through a gully which, once full, would make a natural reservoir. The gully itself was probably a deformed impact crater, a random feature of a terrain that had never been shaped by moving air or water until the Elders had recently created an atmosphere. At the moment, the dam was less than a meter high—Sebastiano's men were having to go further afield in search of suitable rocks to add to it—and the water less than half that depth.

  Empleado heard a noise, turned, and was blinded by intense light. In the next heartbeat, someone was standing beside him turning a small, black, knurled-aluminum flashlight downward to shine on the thin slip of plastic which served each expedition member as ID and—with information retrieval equipment—a dossier on the person it was issued to. This one was unique, its back surface consisting of a hologram. Seeming to float above the card was the curved, elaborate shield of the KGB.

  "Satisfied, Comrade?" came a whispered voice.

  "You!" Empleado couldn't help gasping.

  THIRTY-FIVE Prostitution

  Eichra Oren looked around at his audience gathered in the clearing.

  "This morning," he told them, "if there's no objection, I'll communicate in the human language, English, for the benefit of those without cortical augmentation. Please adjust your implants to the appropriate translation channel."

  The p'Nan debt assessor sat cross-legged on a blanket at the base of a huge canopy tree, sword lying across his knees. Sam lay nearby, tongue out, looking like an ordinary dog. Overhead and to the rear, the pearlescent fungoid growth which would soon be Eichra Oren's quarters jutted over the nearby stream. For a few seconds, only the murmur of that stream broke the silence, as sapients of many sizes and shapes briefly contemplated an inner reality unshared—as yet, the thought entered Toya's mind—by the small handful of humans present.

  They were a mixed handful too, increasingly uncaring of position or rank. Betal was here, having appointed himself a sort of acolyte to the Antarctican. The general, behaving self-consciously toward her as he had since last night, sat beside her on a convenient fallen log. His son Danny leaned against a tree across the clearing, conversing with Sebastiano until the moment Eichra Oren spoke. Not far away, Ortiz glowered (that being his natural, relaxed expression) either at Wise—here for a therapeutic outing on his crippled knee—at his doctor (and everyone else's) Rosalind Nguyen, or at C. C. Jones, whom none of the officers seemed to like. Toya thought him handsome with his rugged features and salt-and-pepper beard. In the middle of the clearing, amidst the aliens, sat Owen and Marna. Even Rubber Chicken Alvarez had shown up. What interest that overgrown class clown had in these proceedings defied Toya's power of imagination. The only individual she missed was Empleado, and she didn't miss him much.

  Aside from her own cosapients, it seemed to her that no two creatures among Eichra Oren's listeners were of the same species. Until a moment ago—the same moment Danny had quit talking—Dlee Raftan Saon, courtly surgeon of an insectile race, had been enjoying what may have been a professional discussion with Rosalind, although Toya rather doubted it. Raftan liked the ladies—of whatever species—and had once even "kissed" Toya's hand.

  Llessure Knarrfic was here, too, which Toya found surprising since that individual was a busy executive in Mister Thoggosh's various enterprises and on top of that, a sort of potted plant-being resembling a giant rubber flower.

  Remaulthiek, on the other hand, dispensed refreshments at Dlee Raftan Saon's infirmary. She resembled a big gray quilt in a plastic bag, being distantly related to skates and rays. She was always interested in anything to do with moral indebtedness. Her rather menial vocation was something of a penance she had long ago imposed on herself for some unknown transgression.

  There was no sign of the sea-scorpions who provided security here, nor of Aelbraugh Pritsch, Mister Thoggosh's assistant, nor (as Aelbraugh Pritsch referred to him) of the "Proprietor" himself. Scutigera was rumored to be off on the other side of the asteroid, dealing with some technical problem which had been bedeviling the nautiloids. Toya did see a giant spider, three meters tall and strikingly beautiful in its red-and-sable furry pelt.

  After a moment, Eichra Oren nodded. "Before we begin this morning, let me help our guests understand what's about to happen. As many of you appreciate, the one debt assessment they've seen was unusual, and may have given them a false impression of what takes place under normal circumstances."

  He shifted on his blanket, settling into a more comfortable position.

  "For most of human history, disputes between individuals have been settled by professional arbiters hired by a government which they—the arbiters—rely on to impose whatever decisions they arrive at, by coercive physical force. Which is to say by threat of injury or death. Those among you unfamiliar with the concept of government will find it described among human customs on one of the supplementary information channels."

  For reasons Toya could only guess, a mild disturbance sifted through the crowd. Eichra Oren let it fade before continuing. "Irrational assumptions, faulty logic, and politically expedient dispositions are the hallmark of such an arrangement. Trial by ordeal was common throughout many human cultures. Imperial magistrates in ancient China were legally empowered to torture testimony from unwilling witnesses, even those not criminally accused. It was left, I imagine, to a magistrate's personal integrity whether that process produced anything resembling the truth."

  Another stir and Toya knew her guess had been correct. The nonhumans were scandalized at this description of human customs while the humans, feeling they were being slandered, reacted in a similar manner. Eichra Oren gave his listeners a moment to absorb the horror of what he'd told them. Meanwhile the nearby stream did more to preserve the resulting silence than to break it, its minimal white noise muffling other sounds.

  "Greater individuation, however," Eichra Oren resumed at last, "is the inviolable rule of evolution. No despot, however draconian, has ever been entirely successful at stopping it. Over many centuries, the brute power of these false arbiters—`judges' they were called—came to be limited and more or less objective standards of evidence and procedure adopted. By the current civilization's nineteenth century, due to worldwide majoritarian influence, judges were generally held to be servants of the people. Even some of them believed it. Everyone involved pretended not to notice where these judges' salaries came from, and the malignant conflict of interest that represented."