Eichra Oren shook his head. "I don't know exactly what I'm suggesting, Mister Thoggosh, except that everyone who was already here—including members of Gutierrez's party—knows all about filmsuits and would probably choose some other way."

  "The trouble with your beautiful theory, Boss," Sam pointed out, "is that they have to be ignorant about filmsuits—and at the same time know how to manipulate the mechanisms down below that got me." Somehow, Eichra Oren felt Sam shudder at the memory.

  The nautiloid agreed with the dog. "Yes, not to mention how neatly they defeated my security precautions. Yet another trouble with the idea is that the saboteur might well have counted on my removing my filmsuit before I noticed the poison. That's very nearly what happened, you know. If it hadn't been for my poor—"

  Mister Thoggosh was cut off as Eichra Oren gave him the cerebrocortical equivalent of a suddenly upthrust hand. Someone—it could only have been one of the Americans, of course, since anybody else would have simply "rung the doorbell" via implant—was outside shouting, pounding frantically on his front door.

  Cautious in light of recent events, the moral debt assessor slipped the tiny silver-colored plasma pistol he always carried out of his tunic pocket. Although it weighed less than a quarter of a kilogram, it may have represented the most powerful type of personal weapon on the asteroid and was a popular choice, especially with many of the smaller sapients. Concealing it in his palm, he rose from the bed, mentally allowing the door to dilate slowly as he approached it.

  Empleado paced up and down on the balcony outside, looking pale and shaken. "Eichra Oren! There's something—somebody lying over there in the trees! I mean a dead body! It's one of the . . . the sea-scorpions with its head all bashed in like—" Abruptly, the former KGB agent turned, bent over the rail of the balcony as if someone had punched him in the stomach, and vomited onto the ground below.

  "KGB agent," observed Sam, watching through the assessor's eyes, "tough guy."

  Without comment, Eichra Oren went back into the house for a fresh towel and moistened it. He returned to the balcony and handed it to Empleado, who was still bent over the rail making futile, retching noises. Eyes streaming, the former KGB man finally straightened, accepted the towel, and pointed a shaky finger at the base of one of the trees perhaps a hundred meters from the house.

  Eichra Oren nodded, descended the short flight of stairs, and crossed the leaf-littered forest floor, headed in the indicated direction. The dead body Empleado had discovered wasn't hard at all to find—but it was impossible to identify.

  For a long while, the assessor knelt beside the corpse, lifting various portions of it with a telescoping stylus from his tunic pocket and peering down at it with much the same expression he'd displayed earlier, examining the edges of his sword.

  "Well, here's a fourth incident for you," he muttered under his breath, addressing Sam and Mister Thoggosh, "to add to your pattern. I don't have any idea who it is, but from his weapon—and the fact that he was caught with it buttoned up under his filmsuit—I'll bet it isn't Tl*m*nch*l or any of his people."

  Sam agreed. Both he and the Proprietor were observing the scene relayed by Eichra Oren's implant. "They're a wholesomely paranoid bunch, all right. And our late friend here is living proof—or at least recently deceased—that paranoids live longer."

  "If it isn't one of Tl*m*nch*l's," Mister Thoggosh declared, "then there's only one other individual it could be. S*bb*ts*rrh, our Small Artifactologist. Dlee Raftan Saon will be able to confirm that through external stimulation of his cerebrocortical implant, of course, and perhaps even get a picture of the killer. By why in an infinite number of universes would anyone wish to kill such a charming, harmless—?"

  "That's the really nasty part, I suspect." Eichra Oren was disgusted. "I don't think it mattered who got killed, as long as the body was found halfway between—"

  A footfall on the dried leaves behind him made Eichra Oren stand up from where he'd been kneeling beside the body and turn, plasma pistol ready in his hand and pointed. Adjusted properly, the little fusion-powered weapon was capable of blasting man-sized holes in solid rock, and the Antarctican had it turned up all the way.

  But it was only Empleado, walking a bit unsteadily and still dabbing at his mouth with the towel. Still preoccupied with the shock of his discovery, he didn't even seem to see the pistol pointed at him. "Do you know who it is, Eichra Oren?"

  "Maybe." The p'Nan moral debt assessor pocketed his weapon. "We were discussing that."

  "We?" Empleado repeated, glancing around.

  "Mister Thoggosh, Sam, and I, via cerebrocortical implant. Let me ask you something which you may recognize from your own experience as professional routine: after you found it, did you move this body or disturb it in any way, Mr. Empleado?"

  Looking bewildered, the man shook his head vigorously. "Arthur, please. No, I didn't. I don't think I could have . . . Eichra Oren, I've got to admit something to you. To somebody. I never really thought of these things—all of the Elders' people, I mean, except for you and maybe Sam—as real people before this. If anyone had told me that I'd react this way to seeing one of them killed . . ."

  At least partly sincere, the debt assessor placed a sympathetic hand on the man's shoulder. "I'm sorry it had to happen this way, Arthur, but it's a good thing to hear, nonetheless. It means you're growing up in a way your own culture never allowed you to. To answer your question, we're not absolutely certain, but we think it's one of the archaeology staff, an individual named S*bb*ts*rrh."

  Apparently it was too much all at once. Empleado reeled with shock. "But . . . I was speaking with him only a few hours ago! We had an argument, a loud one in front of his subordinates. He—" The former KGB man shut up suddenly, displaying the reflex his people had to look around for anyone who happened to be listening.

  Less sympathetic now, the Antarctican tightened his grip on the man's shoulder. "He what?"

  "He insulted me, Eichra Oren, he really insulted me, in several different languages, I think, in front of witnesses!" Empleado took a deep, shuddering breath and let it out. "His clerical staff or whatever. Which makes me the principal suspect."

  Eichra Oren released Empleado's shoulder with a vague look of negation. "Arthur, everybody on this asteroid is a suspect until I get a chance to begin eliminating them one by one. Anyway, as I say, we're not yet completely certain that it's S*bb*ts*rrh . . ." He paused, listening. "Although Mister Thoggosh informs me that S*bb*ts*rrh was the only sea- scorpionoid on 5023 Eris not associated with Tl*m*nch*l's security group. I'll have to call on Dlee Raftan Saon before we can—"

  "That won't be necessary." A voice came from the depths of the forest, followed by the sound of feet wading through dried leaves and other woodland debris. Before either man could respond, the aged insectoid physician emerged from the trees, dapper for one of his kind in the suit of long, multicolored strips Eichra Oren had imagined Gutierrez trying on. "I happened to be on my way to see you."

  Dlee Raftan Saon stopped beside the sea-scorpionoid's body, hunkered down as close as his rigid arthropodic anatomy would permit, and began rummaging through the small black medical bag he always carried. Some things were the same in any universe. "Now where did I put that—ah, here it is! This will only take a moment."

  "And it won't hurt a bit," added Sam, speaking sarcastically from recent experience.

  Ignoring the dog's remarks, as he often did, the physician had removed a black-enameled metal object shaped like a small flashlight from his bag and was applying one end of it to the ruins of the sea-scorpionoid's chitinous skull. After a few suspenseful seconds, the object chirruped at him and Dlee Raftan Saon looked up, consulting information the device had just transmitted to his implant.

  "It's S*bb*ts*rrh, all right," read the insect-being, "age: 323—too young to die, but then aren't we all? Current occupation: Small Artifactologist, originally with the University of H*rr*s*nf*rd where he had taught for—"

  "That will do, Doctor," Mister Thoggosh interrupted. "I have all of that information here. Thank you for identifying the remains—er, he is dead, isn't he?"

  The insect-being chuckled grimly. "I, physician Dlee Raftan Saon, do hereby attest and certify that our friend S*bb*ts*rrh is a former Small Artifactologist—if that's what you meant. Somebody did a pretty brutal job on him." Suddenly he leaped up and confronted Empleado. "Was it you, Mister Secret Policeman?"

  Empleado took a startled step backward. "My God, no! I never . . . I mean I couldn't—" Again the physician chuckled, more good-naturedly this time, and his compound eyes, the size of grapefruit, glittered at the American. "Forgive me, Arthur, I've always wanted to try that, just once. Didn't work worth a dither, did it?"

  "But I didn't have anything against him!" Empleado wasn't listening. "We only disagreed about the importance of preserving antiquities in their undisturbed—"

  "We'll get to that in a minute," Eichra Oren told the man. "I'm not sure I believe you really care about the preservation of antiquities. I think you've been—but we'll see." He turned to Dlee Raftan Saon. "What are the chances of an image of the killer having been recorded in the victim's implant?"

  Dlee Raftan Saon inspected the readouts on his instrument and imitated human head-shaking. "Not good. It was rather badly damaged, I'm afraid."

  "All right, then." Eichra Oren nodded. "What brought you out here in the first place, Doctor?"

  Air rushed in and out of the row of spiracles along Dlee Raftan Saon's abdomen in the insect version of a sigh. "Rosalind Nguyen brings me, Eichra Oren. I've been taking care of minor casualties from the shuttle fire all day, and was looking for a little help. I started inquiring around about her—I do wish she'd have an implant installed—and apparently she can't be found anywhere.

  "She seems to have disappeared!"

  SIXTY-THREE The Cosmic Collective

  She awoke alone, in blackest darkness, without feeling in her hands and feet.

  At first Rosalind thought she'd simply fallen asleep on the command deck of one of the shuttles, until she remembered that they were parked, at present, on the outer surface of the canopy. Nevertheless her hips and shoulders ached from lying on a hard floor in an uncomfortable position, and it was very cold.

  Trying to move, she found that her arms were bound together behind her back and her legs tied at the ankles.

  And she was naked.

  With the greatest possible effort of will, she hammered back the terror threatening to overwhelm her and focused on the immediately practical. In the feeble gravity of 5023 Eris, she must have been lying here for a long time to feel this stiff and sore. Bound as she was, there was no gag in her mouth—be grateful for small favors, she told herself—and she was certain from its bone-numbing chill that the floor beneath her was metal. Despite that paralyzing cold, she also felt stifled somehow, as if the air were unusually humid.

  It wasn't until a loose strand of her own hair floated past her face that she began to guess the truth: she was breathing poorly oxygenated liquid fluorocarbon.

  She must be inside the asteroid!

  No wonder she was cold! The drawback of fluorocarbon in general was that it conducted heat away from one's body more efficiently than air or even water did—this stuff she was breathing now had been hanging in the absolute cold of space for a billion years. Even the cold-blooded Mister Thoggosh maintained his office at close to mammalian body temperature. The invention of central heating, he'd once told her, had contributed as much to the rise of nautiloid civilization as the discovery of coffee—to which he credited the Industrial Revolution—had to her own.

  Also, she was willing now to wager that her aching muscles had every bit as much to do with a marginal supply of oxygen as it might with gravity or lack of heat.

  Something else brushed her face, almost shattering her resolve to remain calm. Whatever it was, it had been slimy, and colder than her own flesh. The sensation lasted only an instant, but she had jerked away, hurting her wrists and ankles.

  "Aha, I see that you have awakened!" The voice coming to her out of the darkness was as liquid as the medium conveying it, even colder, and ominously familiar. "You will be interested, I suspect, to learn that you cannot be found by your friends and will soon be presumed dead—or in hiding. No one but you and I will ever know the truth, that you have been . . . what is the term they use? `Appropriated'—to spend the brief remainder of your life serving the most whimsical desires of your captor."

  Cautiously, Rosalind tested her own voice. "Is it necessary to gloat about it?"

  "But that is one of the principal benefits of doing villainous deeds, is it not?"

  Rosalind felt that she trembled at the edge of recognizing the faceless speaker. His English was unaccented, uninflected by any trace of emotion. His elocution was flawless and pleasant to listen to, even when he addressed unpleasant ideas.

  "In time, of course, a gullible few will come to blame you for the brutal murder of that waterbug thing—disregarding the utter lack of any credible motivation on your part—and of the vile slug who temporarily commands this asteroid vessel."

  She started again. "You killed Mister Thoggosh?"

  "He's as dead as dead can be," the voice rose, almost losing itself in an inhuman, hysterical squeal, "with poison in his tea (would that read better, `sea'?)—they'll find it in his pee, adding up to three for me! And now we two will see," the voice sank to an ominous, terrifying whisper, "what I shall do . . . with thee!"

  Rosalind shivered violently and it had absolutely nothing to do with the cold. She'd recognized the voice at last, and the one thing that frightened her even more than the presence of Nikola Deshovich—dread master of both the Russian and American KGB, meticulous student of the most draconian methods developed by Joseph Stalin, implacable dictator of the United World Soviet, and infamous as "the Banker" for settling his old political debts "with interest"—was the presence of a Nikola Deshovich apparently gone stark, raving mad.

  Involuntarily she spoke his name just as some soft, slimy object brushed her upper arm. Her muscles jumped. Whatever it had been wriggled away across her unprotected flesh.

  "Yes," came the voice in a breathy, almost wistful tone. "It is I, Nikola Deshovich."

  A terrifying silence ensued, during which Rosalind attempted desperately to concentrate on something other than her fear, to recall, for example, how she'd gotten here.

  The last thing she could remember was being on her way to the house of Eichra Oren. She and the Antarctican were on the verge of some sort of personal understanding again, now that the ugly business with Toya was over—and who was she kidding, with this "verge" bullshit? She and Eichra Oren had been powerfully attracted to one another, almost since the first time they'd laid eyes on one another. No matter what had happened with Pulaski, or even with Estrellita, "some sort of understanding" between them had always been as inevitable and unavoidable as the sun rising in the morning.

  All right, then, honesty taken care of, she'd been walking through the woods, almost within sight of the moral debt assessor's house, when she'd felt something brush past her face, a mist or perhaps cobwebs, she'd thought, and then—

  Then nothing.

  Then this.

  Suddenly there was noise in the darkness again, an eerie and unrhythmic wheezing that disturbed all of her instincts as a healer. "In my present unenviable condition, I sometimes lose self-control to my . . . enthusiasms," Deshovich informed her. "Say rather that they sometimes gain control of me. You must forgive me. I assure you that it's only momentary and that I'm practically harmless."

  Rosalind knew this last was a horrible lie. "Your present condition?" she asked, trying to keep her voice even, which was very difficult. "Tell me about your present condition, Nikola Deshovich. Perhaps I can help. I am a doctor, you know."

  "You don't say." Again the wheezing noise. "I had no idea. I simply wanted someone, preferably a young boy or a woman, from the human camp. As you can see, I've settled for a woman. It was a worthy attempt, Doctor, but I'm afraid that even if I were to trust you, which obviously I cannot, there's precious little you could do for me, medically speaking, that hasn't already been done."

  "What happened to you?"

  "Quite an embarrassing series of events, really. My flagship, the Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria, was unceremoniously shot out from under me, practically the moment I arrived. I believe I have your famous General Gutierrez to thank for this, although I rather doubt that he had the satisfaction of knowing it at the time. Nevertheless, I intend to see that he goes down in history as did Benedict Arnold, Erwin Rommel, or Georgi Zhukov—posthumously, of course. I barely escaped with my life."

  In the stifling darkness, the unseen speaker paused again for a moment, apparently to catch his breath, which continued to sound labored to Rosalind when he resumed.

  "And that was only to begin with. We managed to limp away. I was superficially wounded, when the flagship began breaking up, by an ungrateful protégée of mine, a young woman who seized the tragic moment to exact her petty revenge."

  Rosalind controlled her tone. "I see."

  "Being a young woman yourself, you probably do. You're really all alike, you know. `All pink on the inside,' as the saying goes. Then my escape capsule struck the outer covering of this asteroid, sticking fast and killing my perfidious little companion who, I regret to say, was crushed beneath me. I was a man of considerable substance at the time. This lifepod was equipped with an emergency spacesuit of sorts, really nothing more than airtight insulation, without supplemental oxygen or environmental control. I was farsighted enough to have obtained a supply of the solvent which our scientists had produced in order to get our Spetznaz forces through the canopy."

  "Tell it to the Marines," Rosalind replied. "I saw how it worked: flies stuck in amber. Not a pretty sight."

  "Knowing Russian quality control, I had taken the precaution to acquire a sample of the PRC formula. I emerged from the pod, which I suppose would have killed my young lady even if the fall had not. I sprayed the area around my feet with the solvent. The canopy quickly sealed again over my head and I climbed down one of those astonishing trees. It's simply marvelous what even a man of my former girth can accomplish without gravity to hinder him. Dodging troops of every stripe and occasional withering gunfire, as I once did escaping from Siberia to India, I eventually found my way to the excavation site."